On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 7:53 PM, Erik Trimble <erik.trim...@oracle.com> wrote: > Brett wrote: >> >> Hi Folks, >> >> Im in a shop thats very resistant to change. The management here are >> looking for major justification of a move away from ufs to zfs for root file >> systems. Does anyone know if there are any whitepapers/blogs/discussions >> extolling the benefits of zfsroot over ufsroot? >> >> Regards in advance >> Rep >> > > I can't give you any links, but here's a short list of advantages: > > (1) all the standard ZFS advantages over UFS > (2) LiveUpgrade/beadm related improvements > (a) much faster on ZFS > (b) don't need dedicated slice per OS instance, so it's far simpler to > have N different OS installs > (c) very easy to keep track of which OS instance is installed where > WITHOUT having to mount each one > (d) huge space savings (snapshots save lots of space on upgrades) > (3) much more flexible swap space allocation (no hard-boundary slices) > (4) simpler layout of filesystem partitions, and more flexible in changing > directory size limits (e.g. /var ) > (5) mirroring a boot disk is simple under ZFS - much more complex under > SVM/UFS > (6) root-pool snapshots make backups trivially easy > > > > -- > Erik Trimble > Java System Support > Mailstop: usca22-123 > Phone: x17195 > Santa Clara, CA > Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800)
I don't think 2b is given enough emphasis. The ability to quickly clone your root filesystem, apply whatever change you need to (patch, config change), reboot into the new environment, and be able to provably back out to the prior state with easy is a life saver (yes you could do this with ufs, but is assumes you have enough free slices on your direct attached disks, and it takes _far_ longer simply because you must first copy the entire boot environment first -- adding probably a few hours, versus the ~1s to snapshot + clone). _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
