I see plenty of fanfare about 24.04 desktop version supporting installation on ZFS, but I couldn’t find any mention of such for server. I booted up a daily build of the installation ISO and it only offers LVM as a guided option and btrfs, xfs and ext4 as options for partition format during manual partition – no sight of ZFS anywhere.
Are there really no plans to support ZFS roor for server as well?
ZFS is patented technology and included in installation should be in Debian way called as non-free, but as it is known with other techs already included in kernel(which is not the ZFS case) in some countries it is not legal to use it and in some countries techs already included in kernel HAVE TO BE USED THE DEFINED WAY which current installator(also in Debian) cannot guaranty.
Therefore maybe some talks between Oracle are maybe required to have hostings and clouds be ready, but on private hosted metal servers something more is required, but European law system is not ready for that but companies prepared to use Ubuntu Server with ZFS may require this from Ubuntu and maybe some install option would land sometimes when it will be ready(I think) 
And yet, they are releasing the desktop version with support for installing on ZFS root, so it does not seem like any of that is the reason.
I’ve been using zfsroot on Ubuntu for several years and it works fine. There are severl ways to have it running on ubuntu-server. You can install the desktop, and then just remove the desktop-related packages.
You can also see the guides on OpenZFS and ZFS-Boot-menu - to have a very robust setup with automated snapshots.
Either way - ZFS is rock solid and i’m very happy that Ubuntu decided to keep it around.
There are some license issues regarding GPL and Oracle CDDL but that’s mostly related to including ZFS in the Linux kernel. Apart from that all you said about EU law and EU hosting providers is as far from that truth as it can be. Ubuntu and ZFS is utilized by lots of hosting providers in the EU, same case as with FreeBSD which has ZFS as a default filesystem.
Alas, I wasn’t asking how to do it. My point is rather simple: desktop has official support for ZFS root OOTB, why doesn’t server? I see no good technical reason for that.
I also have no idea why it isn’t supported. Can’t think of any technical reason behind it.
Im very curious about the actual reason. Keep in mind that Ubuntu kernel has ZFS built-in so it’s just the case of upgrading the installer.
Today I installed 24.04 ubuntu-server-minimal using adapted 22.04 instructions for ZFS root on OpenZFS.
Hi there. Thanks for the interest in ZFS support on Server.
Tomorrow Subiquity 24.04.1 is due to be released, and indeed we won’t have ZFS as part of the installation options available in the Server installer UI. ZFS on server in the UI will be part of a future release of Subiquity.
Your options at this point are:
If doing autoinstall, this config sets up the ZFS guided layout.
autoinstall:
storage:
layout:
name: zfs