Bennett, Steve wrote:
A slightly different tack now...
what filesystems is it a good (or bad) idea to put on ZFS?
root - NO (not yet anyway)
home - YES (although the huge number of mounts still scares me a bit)
/usr - possible?
not yet - the system wouldn't be patchable or upgradeable.
/var - possible?
not yet, same reasons.
swap - no?
for now, maybe. Offhand I'd say you should have some swap
on a slice for now, although you can have additional swap
space on zvols. When zfs root is supported, the swap space
set up by install will be a zvol in the root pool.
Is there any advantage in having multiple zpools over just having one
and allocating all filesystems out of it?
Obviously if you wanted (for example) /export/home to be raidz and /usr
to be mirror you would have to, but are there other considerations
beyond that?
It is likely that "best practice" will be to separate the
root pool (that is, the pool where dataset are allocated
for the purpose of serving as root file systems) from
pool(s) used for data. There are several reasons for this:
* there will be some limitations on root pools that you
would not want to place on data pools. For example,
no concatenation or RAID-Z (mirroring will be supported,
however).
* data pools can be architecture-neutral. It can make
sense to move a data pool between sparc and intel. Root
pools are pretty much tied to a particular architecture.
* In general, we think it's a good idea to separate the
"personality" of a system from its data. Then you can
change one without having to change the other.
But separate pools for what we now sometimes allocate as separate
file systems (root, /usr and /var, for example) makes no sense
at all. It probably won't even be a supported configuration.
Separate *datasets* for those directories will be possible,
but only in the same pool.
I'm thinking that zfs frees me up from getting the sizing 'right' at
install time i.e. big enough that I don't have to resize later, which
inevitably means at least one filesystem being far bigger than it needs
to be.
Yes, that's one of the advantages of zfs we hope to take advantage of
in install procedures when zfs is supported as a root file system.
Lori
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