Historically I've used hardware raid1 for the boot disks on my servers. With the availability of ZFS root, I want to explore making the two underlying drives directly available to the operating system and create a ZFS mirror to avail of error detection and self-healing.
The current openSolaris installer, when given an entire disk, partitions it into two slices: s0 for the ZFS pool, and s1 for swap. Once the system is installed, I could add the second disk as a mirror, giving redundancy for the pool, but that would leave swap as a single point of failure. I investigated using a ZFS zvol for swap, which appears to be a viable option, but based on what I read you could not use a ZFS zvol for a dump device. The dumpadm man page under openSolaris says: "For systems with a ZFS root file system, dedicated ZFS volumes are used for swap and dump areas. For further information about setting up a dump area with ZFS, see the ZFS Administration Guide." However, the actual documentation ahttp://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5461/gaypf?l=en' says "Using a ZFS volume as a dump device is not supported." That is Solaris 10 documentation, though. Can openSolaris actually use a ZFS zvol for dump? A somewhat related question, I was trying to determine the best way to convert the default install into the disk layout I want. For ZFS root, is it required to have a partition and slices? Or can I just give it the whole disk and have it write an EFI label on it? I know you cannot remove disks currently from a pool, but you can swap out devices, correct? So can I swap in the second disk (either the whole disk, or the overlap partition of a legacy labeled disk) to replace the initial installation disk, and then attach the original disk again as the second half of the mirror (again either the entire disk, or the overlap slice)? -- Paul B. Henson | (909) 979-6361 | http://www.csupomona.edu/~henson/ Operating Systems and Network Analyst | [EMAIL PROTECTED] California State Polytechnic University | Pomona CA 91768 _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
