On Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:20:23 PST
Per Ekstr?m <pelle.ekstrom at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hmm...I see. I'm at this moment not that REALLY in, what this with
> "pools" actually meen, because I so used to the old traditional
> "partitioning" system. So if you can explain REALLY easy what I
> should do, when it comes to installing and partitioning, I'd be
> really thankful. Should I for example use the option "Use whole
> disk" on all the 3 ' 1Tb harddrives in the install menu?
I have to back up a bit - it looks like the you can't boot OpenSolaris
from a raidz yet - the zfs code in grub doesn't understand them. So
you can't just create a 3-disk raidz from your three drives and have
it work.
I'm not familiar enough with the installer to know what would happen
if you tried "use whole disk" on all three drives. I'd expect you
either get a three-drive mirror with 1TB (grub can boot from a zfs
mirror, as that only requires reading one drive), or a 3TB pool with
no redundancy. I suspect neither is what you have in mind. You could
go with a 1TB system disk and a 1TB mirror of the other two, but 1TB
is a *lot* more space than you need for the system disk.
> I have one external drive I maybee could use also as a systemdrive
> perhaps, but i don't like the idea to not to have all systems in
> "one unit", when perhaps moving the computer, or someting like
> that..?..and what happens if this crash's, do I lose all data on the
> other 3 drives then..?
If the system crashes, the other three drives should be just fine. ZFS
is fairly robust that way. You might have to use "zpool import -f ..."
to import them on a new system, but that should be about it.
So you're back to needing a separate system drive. Just install to
that, and use the entire drive. Then, after you've got it installed,
you can turn your three drives into the 3-drive raidz storage like so
(the sample output is odd, as I have two drives configured as a
two-disk mirror for the system and the data store hasn't been added
yet):
1) run the format command to find your drives:
# format
Searching for disks...done
AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
0. c8d0 <DEFAULT cyl 9036 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63>
/pci at 0,0/pci-ide at 1f,2/ide at 0/cmdk at 0,0
1. c8d1 <DEFAULT cyl 9036 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63>
/pci at 0,0/pci-ide at 1f,2/ide at 0/cmdk at 1,0
(hit Control-C to exit).
2) Check which drives are in use with zpool:
# zpool status
pool: rpool
state: ONLINE
scrub: none requested
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
rpool ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
c8d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c8d1s0 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
3) You should have three drives listed by format that aren't in any
existing pool. You create the new pool like so:
# zpool create tank raidz c4t0d0s0 c5t0d0s0 c6t0d0s0
That will create a second pool using raidz from the three drives,
mounted as /tank. You can then proceed from there as normal. However,
I'd read up on zfs first - it really does have some cool
functionality.
Personally, I'd be leery of putting the system disk on an external
drive. If you've got internal drive bays, there are some relatively
inexpensive sata controllers that opensolaris supports, or you could
go with a PATA drive (a lot of external USB boxes use PATA drives,
though they're shifting to SATA to do eSATA).
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.
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