Background:

I'm investigating the viability of using a filesystem other than ext3/4, with the ability to run snapshots for backup and rollback purposes. The servers under consideration are mailbox server nodes running on Linode's Xen based VPS platform. I'm particularly drawn to the various published benefits which ZFS offers in terms of data integrity and this year's stable release of native ZFS support in Linux - http://zfsonlinux.org

ZFS appears to be the more thorough option in terms of benefits and simplicity (instead of LVM+XFS). Please note that I have little experience with ZFS (which I use on a local FreeNAS installation) and none with XFS, hence the post. To date, my servers are using ext3 filesystems, not managed under LVM.

Question in detail:

So, I have two questions.

(1) Which of the two filesystems would be the better choice for the best of all of the following 3 aspects, running on a Xen Linux guest?

• Snapshots
• Data Integrity
• Performance

(2) If ZFS is a viable option, is it practical to use ZRAID across Xen disk images to further enhance the solution for data integrity?

Note: I'm reluctant to consider btrfs, given the many warnings I've read about in using it on production systems.