Hi, I have a small Linux server PC at home (Intel Core2 Q9300, 4 GB RAM), and I'm seriously considering switching to OpenSolaris (Indiana, 2008.11) in the near future, mainly because of ZFS. The idea is to run the existing CentOS 4.7 system inside a VM and let it NFS mount home directories and other filesystems from OpenSolaris. I might migrate more services from Linux over time, but for now, the filesystems are priority one.
Since most of my questions are actually about ZFS, I thought I'd ask here directly. First of all, I'm on a budget and while "cheap" is important, "value for the money" is critical. So the less number of disk, the better (not only because of price but also because of power consumption and the lack of cooling). This also means that I prefer RAID-Z to mirrors for less critical data. 1) My plan is to install 2008.11 on three 1 TB disks (Samsung SpinPoint F1, two new and one currently containing Linux data). I will start with a single, new disk and install the OS on a zpool inside an fdisk partition, say 100 GB large. This is where the OS and /home will live. The rest of the disk will later be used for less critical data (music, video, VMs, backups, etc), inside an fdisk partition of type "Unix". Once installed, I'll attach the second new disk, using identical partition layout, and attach the 100 GB partition as mirror to the root pool. I'll then create a sparse ZFS volume and use this together with the unused fdisk partition on each disk to create a 3-way RAID-Z pool, and finally degrade it by taking the sparse file offline. I'll then start migrating the Linux files, probably using a VM directly mounting the ext3 filesystems from the old 1 TB disk and copying home directories to the mirror pool and media files to the raid-z pool. Finally, I'll reformat and attach the third disk to the pools. I thus hope to end up with three disk and two pools: one small 3-way mirror for critical data and one large 3-way raid-z pool for the rest. How does this idea sound to you? Will I be able to enable the write cache in this setup (not that write speed matters much to me, but still)? 2) Given the perhaps unusual disk layout, do you think I'll run into trouble concerning OS upgrades or if/when one of the disks fails? I've tried the procedure in VMware and found a few gotchas, but nothing too serious (like "zpool import -f rpool" to make grub work after installation, and trying to create the second zpool on c4t0d0p1 -- which happened to be the same as c4t0d0s0, where rpool lives -- instead of c4t0d0p2; funny "zpool create" didn't complain?) 3) One problem I don't understand why I got is this: When I attach a new virgin disk to the system, I first run format->fdisk to make two fdisk partitions and then use prtvtoc/fmthard to create the splices on the solaris partition. When I then try to attach the new c4t1d0s0 to the existing c4t1d0s0, zpool complains that only complete disks can be attached. However, after a reboot, the slice attaches without problems (except that I have to use -f since c4t1d0s0 overlaps with c4t1d0s2, which is also something I don't understand -- of course it does?). How come? 4) I plan to use a sparse ZFS volume for the Linux VM root disk, probably from the mirror pool. Objections? 5) Given that this is all cheap PC hardware ... can I move a disk from a broken controller to another, and if so, how? I tried this in VMware, but could not figure out how to re-attach the moved disk. zpool complains that the moved disk is part of an active zpool and -f didn't help at all. Any input would be greatly appreciated! -- ---- Martin Blom --------------------------- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---- Eccl 1:18 http://martin.blom.org/
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