Wow! I solved a tricky problem this morning thanks to Zones & ZFS integration. We have a SAS SPDS database environment running on Sol10 06/06. The SPDS database is unique in that when a table is being updated by one user it is unavailable to the rest of the user community. Our nightly update jobs (occassionally they turn into day jobs when they take longer :-() were coming in the way of our normal usage.
So I put on my ZFS cap and figure it can be simply solved by deploying the 'clone' feature. Simply stated I'd create a clone of all the SPDS filesystems and start another instance of SPDS to read/write from the cloned data. Unfortunately I hit a wall when I realized that there is no way to update the SPDS metadata (binary file containing a description of the physical structure of the database) with the new directory path. I was stumped until it occurred to me that I can solve it by simply marrying the clones with a Solaris Zone!!!! Now our problem is solved as follows: 1. Stop local zone 2. Reclaim the ZFS clones in the global-zone 3. Destroy the clone/snapshot 4. Recreate the clone/snapshot 5. Restart the local zone 6. Start SPDS in the local zone and it works beautifully because it sees all the files it needs per its metadata!!! To accomplish the same in traditional methods would have required a SAN disk, disk merge/split, ... You get the picture, ugly! Chalk one more victory for the Solaris 10 Zones/ZFS!!! Thanks to the developers of these features that enabled me elegantly solve a difficult problem. -Anantha- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
