On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Henrik Johansson <henr...@henkis.net> wrote: > Hi all, > If anyone is interested or have comments. > I did a very quick test with zones on a deduped zpool and the footprint > seems quite low, a little over 10MB per zone after the initial for OSOL > default installed zone. > http://sparcv9.blogspot.com/2009/11/dedupliation-with-zones.html > (I know the spelling is wrong in the URL, not trivial to change without > making a new post thought) > Regards > Henrik > http://sparcv9.blogspot.com
The last time that I played with zones on OpenSolaris, the set of software installed was small enough to not be terribly useful. I expect that as the size of the zone grows to accommodate a useful set of software, the dedup ratio will be even more favorable. About a year ago I was looking into how much duplicate data there is in Solaris 10 zones that had been live anywhere between a day and 18 months. The majority were sparse root zones, with a 500 MB soft partition allocated as the zone path. Any whole root zones were created in a similar manner with a zone path of 4 - 8 GB. I assumed that the deduplication would be done at a 4 KB block size (ASIS on NetApp) and as such calculated the md5 hash of each 4 KB block then analyzed from there. I believe the sample size was around 120 zones. What I found was that there was that deduplication would be likely to reduce storage needs for zone roots by 75%. In other words, "sort -u md5list | wc -l" was 25% of "wc -l md5list". This number would surely go up if the zones were full root zones or if the file system would rewrite empty blocks with a consistent pattern (e.g. write 0's over empty blocks). In my case the vast majority of application binaries and data were not in the sample as they are stored in file systems other than the zonepath. -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ zones-discuss mailing list zones-discuss@opensolaris.org
