Strikes me that at the moment Sun/ZFS team is missing a great opportunity. Imagine Joe bloggs has a historical machine with Just Any Old Bunch Of Discs... (it's not me, no really).
He doesn't want to have to think too hard about pairing them up in mirrors or in raids - and sometimes they die or are just too small so need to get swapped out - or maybe they are iSCSI/AoE targets that might disappear (say the 'spare space' on a thousand desktop PC's...) What Joe really wants to say to ZFS is: "Here is a bunch of discs. Use them any way you like - but I'm setting 'copies=2' or 'stripes=5' and 'parity=2' so you just go allocating space on any of these discs trying to make sure I always have resilliance at the data level." Now I can do that at the moment - well the copies/ditto kind anyway - but if I lose or remove one of the discs, zfs will not start the zpool. [i]That sucks!!![/i] Because... if one disc has gone from a bunch of 10 or so, and I have all my data and metadata using dittos, then the data that was on that disc is replicated on the others - so losing one disc is not a problem (unless there wasn't space to store all the copies on the other discs, I know) but zfs should be able to start that zpool and give me the option to reditto the data that has lost copies on the dead/removed disc. So I get nice flexible "mirroring" by just throwing a JAOBOD at zfs and it does all the hard work. I really cant see this being difficult - but I guess it is dependant on the zpool remove <vdev> functionality being complete. -- Paul This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
