In all honesty, I haven't done much at sysadmin level with Solaris since it was SunOS 5.2. I found ZFS after becoming concerned with reliability of traditional RAID5 and RAID6 systems once drives exceeded 500GB.
I have a few months running ZFS on FreeBSD lately on a test/augmentation basis with 1TB drives in older hardware. Thus far, it seems very promising. As other people have pointed out though, one's mileage may vary. I am interested in a blend of performance, reliability and cost. I think ZFS can deliver all three across the board. You are right - if I am not aware enough yet on the docs to know the difference between a zil device and a slog device, I guess I need to finally hit the books on this one some more. ZFS seems both stable enough and I think also has enough 'cool factor' to it, that its probably about time there were some books available? Perhaps if/when Solaris 10 gets de-dupe that will be the breaker/maker? I have a couple more comments down below. Thanks for the response, and once more - I have very much been enjoying the 'SSD best practices' thread. On Apr 19, 2010, at 4:12 AM, Khyron wrote: > I would advise getting familiar with the basic terminology and vocabulary of > ZFS > first. Start with the Solaris 10 ZFS Administration Guide. It's a bit more > complete > for a newbie. > > http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5461?l=en > > You can then move on to the Best Practices Guide, Configuration Guide, > Troubleshooting Guide and Evil Tuning Guide on solarisinternals.com: > > http://www.solarisinternals.com//wiki/index.php?title=Category:ZFS > > All of the features in ZFS on Solaris 10 appear in OpenSolaris; the inverse > does > not necessarily hold true, as active development occurs on the OpenSolaris > trunk > and updates take about a year to filter back down into Solaris due to > integration > concerns, testing, etc. Yes, I understand this. When the heck is de-dupe coming into Solaris 10? People could save enough money on disks (not too mention the power bills and the cooling costs) to upgrade maybe? > > A Separate Log (SLOG) device can be used for a ZIL, but they are not > necessarily > the same thing. The ZIL always exists, and is part of the pool if you have > not > defined a SLOG device. > > The zpool.cache file does not reside in the pool. It lives in /etc/zfs in > the root > file system of your OpenSolaris system. Thus, it does not reside "on the ZIL > device" either, since there may not necessarily be a SLOG (what you would > term > a "ZIL device") anyway. (There is always a ZIL, though. See remarks above.) > I have one test box, running FreeBSD8, not Solaris, and have no /etc/zfs/zpool.cache or /usr/local/etc/zpool.cache, I will check on another list about that and how they are handling it. > Hopefully that clears up some of the misconceptions and misunderstandings you > have. > > Cheers!
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