[geeks] solaris questions

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Some questions about Solaris:
> 
> ZFS:
> 
> Is there any benefit to running ZFS on a single drive, or two dissimilar 
> drives?
> 
> My new server has an 80GB primary and a 400GB data drive.  Currently 
> everything is on the primary except /u, where my data will live.
> 
> Is there a way to have / be UFS to it can boot, but install the rest of 
> the system (/usr, /var, etc) on ZFS?  I didn't see an option in the 
> installer to make that choice.
Supposedly opensolaris will let you boot on ZFS.  Not sure of the 
limitations.

> How do you run ZFS on hardware RAID?  In the future I am thinking of a 
> nice 3Ware RAID card.  I like the hardware RAID because it reduces the 
> overhead bandwidth and so far I've found the good cards very fast, even 
> some cheaper ones.

Assuming that the RAID card presents the RAIDed disks as one larger 
disk, you would create a zfs pool on that single drive device.  ZFS 
would not do RAID but would still do its checksumming.

> Can you turn off ZFS's RAID features and just use it to slice up a RAID 
> array and manage it, or will it possibly "compete", and the double-layer 
> of RAID cause problems?

Yes, you do not pass the mirror or raidz or raidz2 arguments to zpool 
create.

> Zones:
> 
> How can you create a zone without all the packages in the global zone 
> being put in it?
There is not a way to avoid the packages being installed.  However in my 
case, I have been able to have just 37M of disk used in creating a new 
zone by having the zone inherit (read-only shared within the zone) /opt 
, /sbin/ /usr /bin etc.

> Is there a sane way to handle Blastwave packages and dependencies with 
> regard to zones?

Yes, with the caveat that everything installed in the global zone ends 
up in each zone.

--Patrick