+1 We're also hoping to use U6 with zfsroot for all new installs, but the time consumed by doing the long install and adding patches and packages through finish scripts just makes the install part of deployment take too long. We're so heavily automated around jumpstart and flash, not having flash installs makes zfsroot a "lab only" feature. We can't deploy it wide scale without the revision control and automation that flash gives us.
It takes us about 15-30 minutes to do a flash install, from 'boot net - install' to final boot, ready for our internal customers. Long install plus patches is more like 1.5-3 hours. After 3 years of flash install times, our operational staff laughed at me when I explained they could have zfsroot, but at the expense of install time. I have made my support folks well aware of our views on this.. I'm curious.. Since the installer actually segfaults and doesn't exit cleanly with an error indicating that flash is unsupported, why is this not just a bug to be squashed? I don't understand why it's complicated.. flash is just a cpio archive, right? Why is creating zfs filesystems and mounting them different than creating ufs filesystems and mounting them when it comes to extracting the cpio archive into the filesystem(s) for the install? I really just don't understand, I'd love for someone to explain it.. Thanks for listening! --Kris Today at 12:14, Matt Walburn <matt at railwave.com> wrote: > I'll raise my hand then, with one vote to say it's worth it! ;) > > My company has some high hopes of standardizing on Update 6 with ZFS root, > but it may be a tough sell if that means we have to go back to package-based > installations. We spent a large portion of 2008 getting a very efficient and > automated provisioning process for deploying our Solaris 10 standard > operating environement images using Flash Archive, and we really hope we can > move to ZFS and leave the process mostly intact. > > Plus, isn't S11 slated for 2010? That's an awfully long time to wait to have > this bolted on. > > Thanks! > > -Matt > > On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 1:46 PM, Lori Alt <Lori.Alt at sun.com<mailto:Lori.Alt > at sun.com>> wrote: > On 12/03/08 12:20, Dave Miner wrote: > > Matt Walburn wrote: > > > install-discuss, > > Now that we've finally got support for ZFS root filesystems on Solaris > 10, I was wondering if anyone knows what the status is for ZFS Flash > Archive. Presumably it would use ZFS send/receive functionality, but is > rolling that into Flash Archive something that's on the roadmap? > > > > We expect in later versions of Caiman (and thus OpenSolaris) to provide > a replacement, I guess, for the Flash functionality. There's been > kibitzing around using ZFS snapshots instead of cpio archives for such a > thing, but nothing concrete. > > For Solaris 10, I don't presently expect any work of that nature to be done. > > > > > I'll confirm that. At this time, no work is planned to implement > Flash Archives for zfs root file systems in S10. That doesn't > mean it won't happen. It just isn't a committed project. There's > considerable internal debate going on right now on whether > it's worth doing and if so, who should do it. > > Lori > > > -- Thomas Kris Kasner Qualcomm Inc. 5775 Morehouse Drive San Diego, CA 92121 (858)658-4932 You can never really know rejection, Until you are ignored by a Cat. (unknown)
