Solaris 10 6/06 ZFS and Zones, not quite there yet...
I was all excited to get ZFS working in our environment, but alas, a warning appeared in the docs, which drained my excitement! :
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-1592/6mhahuous?a=view
essentially it says that ZFS should not be used for non-global zone root file systems.. I was hoping to do this, and make it easy, global zone root UFS, and another disk all ZFS where all non-global whole root zones would live.
One can only do so much with only 4 drives that require mirroring! (x4200's, not utilizing an array)
Sigh.. Maybe in the next release (I'll assume ZFS will be supported to be 'bootable' by then...
Dave
[660 byte] By [
mc2104dave] at [2007-11-26 8:33:23]
# 1
> I was all excited to get ZFS working in our
> environment, but alas, a warning appeared in the
> docs, which drained my excitement! :
>
> http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-1592/6mhahuous?a=
> view
>
> essentially it says that ZFS should not be used for
> non-global zone root file systems..
Yes. If you can live with the warning it gives (you may not be able to upgrade the system), then you can do it.The problem is that the the installer packages (which get run during an upgrade) don't currently handle ZFS.
> Sigh.. Maybe in the next release (I'll assume ZFS
> will be supported to be 'bootable' by then...
Certainly one of the items needed for bootable ZFS is awareness in the installer. So yes it should be fixed by the time full support for ZFS root filesystems is released. However last I heard, full root ZFS support was being targeted for update 4, not update 3.
--
Darren
# 2
It shouldn't be too much of an issue. While they advice against it (for obvious reasons) there are also plenty of possible actions to overcome this current limitation. For example; if you read an explenation of your url (here: http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=11552) you'll see that one of the major issues is that the installer isn't "zfs aware". Meaning that it can determine that you have a certain amount of free space while in fact you don't.
ZFS can overcome that through the use of quota's and reservations. Those are the somewhat "advanced" topics but IMO very liable to get you going. And you can always consider to keep your root on UFS and everything else on a ZFS pool.
LionO at 2007-7-6 21:58:58 >
