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Configuring jumpstart to install Solaris on a ZFS root
I was playing around with ZFS root a week or two back, and wanted to be able to create the ZFS root pool and associated file systems (dump device, swap, /var) through jumpstart. To install to a ZFS root pool, you can add the "pool" directive to your client profile: The entry above breaks down as follows: The device list can contain a single device for non-mirrored configurations, or multiple devices for mirrored configurations. If you specify a mirrored configuration, you will need to include the "mirror" keyword in your profile: If you are using live upgrade, you can also name the boot environment with the "bootenv" keyword. This is pretty cool stuff, and it's nice having the various ZFS features (checksums, snapshots, compression, etc.) available in the root pool!
$ read more →Automating ZFS snapshots with the SMF auto-snapshot service
One of the nice features of ZFS is the ability to take file system snapshots, which you can then use to recover perviously deleted data. In recent opensolaris and Nevada builds, there are several auto-snapshot services that can be used to schedule hourly, daily, weekly and monthly snapshots: To enable scheduled snapshots (these services are disabled by default), you can enable one or more of these services with svcadm. Once enabled, these services will create a cron entry in the zfssnap users crontab: The cron jobs are used to schedule the automated snapshots, and are added and removed when one of the services are enabled or disabled. I'm not entirely clear why the auto-snapshot author didn't use "*" in the daily and hourly entries, but hopefully there is a good reason…
$ read more →Zoning Brocade switches Creating configurations
I've previously talked about creating Brocade aliases and zones, and wanted to discuss zone configurations in this post. Brocade zone configurations allow you to group one or more zones into an administrative unit, which you can then apply to a switch. Brocade has a number of commands that can be used to manage configurations, and they start with the string "cfg": To create a new configuration, you can run the cfgcreate command with the name of the configuration to create, and an initial zone to place in the configuration: Once the configuration is created, you can add additional zones using the cfgadd command: To ensure that your changes persistent through switch reboots, you can run cfgsave to write the configuration to flash memory: To view a configuration, you can run the cfgshow command: Now you may notice in the output that there is a defined and effective configuration. The effective configuration contains the configuration that is currently running on the switch, and the defined configuration contains the configuration that is saved in flash…
$ read more →Zoning Brocade switches creating zones
I previously talked about creating aliases on Brocade switches, and am going to use this post to discuss zone creation. Zones allow you to control initiators and targets can see each other, which enhances security by limiting access to devices connected to the SAN fabric. As previously discussed, we can assign an alias to each initiator and target. Once an alias is assigned, we can create a zone and add these aliases to it…
$ read more →Zoning Brocade switches creating aliases
In my previous Brocade post, I talked about Brocade zoning, and mentioned at a high level what is required to implement zoning. Prior to jumping in and creating one or more zones in your fabric, you should add aliases to describe the devices that are going to be zoned together. An alias is a descriptive name for a WWN or port number, which makes your zone configuration much easier to read (if you are the kinda person who can spout off the WWNs of all of the devices in your fabric, you can kindly ignore this post). Brocade switches come with a number of commands to manage aliases, and these commands start with the string "ali": To create a new alias, you will first need to locate the WWN(s) or port(s) you want to assign to the alias…
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