The inability to remove devices from ZFS Zpools has been one of the most annoying / inflexiable things about ZFS. I once read a blogpost about somenone who added a USB flash stick into the root ZFS pool, and now the USB stick became a perminent fixture of the machine! There was no simple way [...]
Dennis Clarke blogged about an introduction to opensolaris 2008.05, IPS, and how using ZFS (and beadm) as your root file system provides advantages with system upgrades and multiple root file systems. Take a look at his blog post here if you haven’t yet seen IPS on opensolaris. A lot of people are really glad to [...]
The flag day for ZFS boot support was just announced which will allow for root file systems (/, /var, /usr) to be bootable from both SPARC and x86 platforms. It looks like this functionality is going to come into OpenSolaris at build 88. The install support (selecting ZFS file systems from a jumpstart profile) or [...]
If you are running ZFS in production, you may have experienced a situation where your server paniced and reboot when a ZFS file system was corrupted. With George Wilson’s recent putback of CR #6322646, this is no longer the case. George’s putback allows the file system administrator to set the “failmode” property to control that [...]
I use jumpstart at home to update the hosts in my lab as new Nevada builds and Solaris updates are released. As part of the unattended installation / upgrade process, I create a couple of ZFS file systems on each system. Since jumpstart doesn’t have built-in support for creating ZFS file system, I had to [...]
Over the course of the past four months, I have encountered a couple of ZFS bugs that led to corrupt pools. One of the bugs hit this weekend, and resulted in us having to recover the pool from a snapshot on our storage array (this experience has made me truly appreciate the 3par’s snapshot capability). [...]
