This is wonderful Dave! I love your conclusions and proposals. I'll be the storage zealot with the following points:
1) On page 13 you noted iSCSI. I think that we'll continue to see iSCSI grow in popularity and in many ways be used in the same situations that we currently leverage NFS. For instance, I currently use an iSCSI LUN for my Flash Archives, home directory, backups, etc. In many cases I've already started using ZFS on iSCSI for these purposes. I don't see that this really changes your document at all, but just wanted to add some supporting evidence by the need you already defined in your document. I greatly appreciate you think far enough ahead to consider iSCSI at this early stage in the project. 2) Perhaps I missed it, but I see no mention of SVM. While SVM is a powerful and useful tool, in the context of SMB/Developers, it is extremely difficult to use. Root mirroring can be difficult and error prone even for seasoned Solaris administrators but is considered a standard practice throughout the industry. This is only made worse by the fact that you must be experienced with SVM to know that you need to set aside a small slice for the SVM MetaDB's. I've seen plenty of users and admins get frustrated with SVM immediately because they were unaware of this requirement untill they'd already fully installed the system. Most Linux administrators would take for granted the fact that installers like Anaconda by default will setup LVM to root mirror. By making root mirroring an option during install we can really ease the burden on a lot of SA's and make it a non-issue for users who just want it but don't care about SVM at all. As a side note, the current default partitioning scheme is really misleading to new users. Allocating root just slightly larger than they need and then allocating all over free space to /export (something that Linux admins have rarely even heard of or understand). A default of providing all space to root and then letting uses modify from there is a much more friendly approach. Other issues that I find confuse new uses revolve around "strange" Sun defaults, like AutoFS for /home (new users can't create home directories in /home, and often don't know why) and always booting a new system to a friendly Sendmail error because they don't provide a FQDN for /etc/hosts. I look forward to watching this project unfold. Your a brave man Dave! benr. -- This messages posted from opensolaris.org
