On Tue, 19 Aug 2008, Ivan Ordonez wrote: > > I would like to get your opinion on what is the best way to setup the > machine using ZFS on all drives and partitions. I want to use Zones, > Live Upgrade and Virtualbox in the future. > > The machine is SUN Ultra 40 M2 with 6G of RAM, 2 dual core AMD CPU, and > three physical drive with 250G each. I installed Solaris 10 5/08 (5.10 > Generic_137112-05) using Solaris Interactive (I chose all the default > options and partitioning) on the first physical drive, c1d0s0. The two > other physical drives (c2d0s0 and c3d0s0) were formatted and partitioned > the same way as c1d0s0. I want to convert c1d0s0 to ZFS filesystem and > setup raid1 mirroring using c2d0s0. I want to use the third drive > (c3d0s0) for live upgrade, virtualbox and zones. I want minimal > downtime in case one of the drive fails, and need to be replace.
The problem is that the advice which is best for Solaris 10U5 will be invalidated by Solaris 10U6, which should be available a month or two. That is because Solaris 10U6 will offer support for ZFS boot so your first two drives can be in one mirrored pool. Given this expected short term future, the best path forward is likely to place an order now for a fourth disk drive. The first drive can be your Solaris boot disk, without redundant data protection. Put your two other drives (c2d0s0 and c3d0s0) into a mirrored pool, using the whole disk rather than partitions. This will be your data pool. You can use the extra space on c1d0s0 for non-critical data storage using UFS or ZFS. When Solaris 10U6 arrives, you can install the extra disk and re-install your system from scratch so that the first two disks are your ZFS root pool, and the previously existing mirror pool continues to function as before. I don't know what live upgrade for Solaris 10U6 looks like, but if we are luckly it has the smarts to upgrade an existing boot disk to form a ZFS root pool. Assuming that the fourth disk shows up before Solaris 10U6 then I think that you can create a second boot Solaris 10U5 boot environment on that disk (using lucreate') so that if your normal root disk craters, you are still able to boot via the second disk (with possible data loss). The location of the GRUB menu is always a problem since it seems that there can be only one master GRUB menu, and it might be on the disk that craters. I have a SUN Ultra 40 M2 here as well, and since a motherboard replacement a month ago (requiring three motherboards before finding one that maybe worked), the system has just not been the same. The Emulex fiber channel card now locks up (is specifically shut down with "Adaptor error") sometimes at the start of a 'zfs scrub'. Yesterday I found that the system had mysteriously shut down at the start of a zfs scrub (according to 'last') without being requested to by a user, without any apparent panic, and without any updates to /var/adm/messages. Unfortunately, I installed Solaris 10U5 shortly after the motherboard swap so it is difficult to tell if the strange behavior is due to hardware, or if Solaris 10U5 (or its Emulex device driver) has a dreadful bug. My experience should be fair warning that even with a service contract your system can be down unexpectly for a whole week and the replacement parts might not work due to a quality control problem. The disk drives are perhaps not the primary concern. Bob ====================================== Bob Friesenhahn [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
