Thanks for responses. There is a lot there I am looking forward to digesting. Right off the bat though I wanted to bring up something I found just before reading this reply as the answer to this question would automatically answer some other questinos
There is a ZFS best practices wiki at http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide#General_Storage_Pool_Performance_Considerations that makes a couple points: *Swap space - Because ZFS caches data in kernel addressable memory, the kernel sizes will likely be larger than with other file systems. Configure additional disk-based swap to account for this difference. You can use the size of physical memory as an upper bound to the extra amount of swap space that might be required. Do not use slices on the same disk for both swap space and ZFS file systems. Keep the swap areas separate from the ZFS file systems. *Do not use slices for storage pools that are intended for production use. So after reading this it seems that with only 4 disks to work with and the fact that UFS for root (initial install) is still required that my only option to conform to the best practice is to use two disks with UFS/RAid1 leaving only the remaining two disks for 100% ZFS. Additionally, the swap partition would have to go on the UFS set of disks to keep it seperate from the ZFS set of disks If I am misinterpreting the wiki please let me know. There are some tradeoffs here. I would prefer to use a 4 way mirrored slice of a UFS root and a 4 way mirrored slice of UFS swap, and then leave equal slices free for ZFS, but then it sounds like I would have to risk not following the best practice and have to mess with SVM. The nice thing is I could be looking at 128GB yield with a decent level fault tolerance. With Zpooling could I take each of the two 64GB slices and place them into two zfs stripes (raid0) and then join those two into a zfs mirror? Seems like then I could get a 128GB yield without having to use the RaidZ/Hot or Raidz2 which according the links I just skimmed performs/lasts below mirroring The other option I described above, I could just slap the first two disks into a HW raid 1 as the x4200's support 2 disk raid1's and then slap the remaining 2 disks into ZFS and this (I think) would not be violating the best practice? Any thoughts on the best practice points I am raising? It disturbs me that it would make a statement like "don't use slices for production". This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
