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Posts in Storage
ZFS boot support for SPARC / x86
The flag day for ZFS boot supportwas 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 from optical media looks like it'll make its way into build 89. A lot of people have been waiting to play with this on SPARC platforms…
$ read more →Configuring ZFS to gracefully deal with pool failures
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 happens when a pool incurs a fault. Here is a description of the new property from the zpool(1m) manual page: Controls the system behavior in the event of catas- trophic pool failure…
$ read more →Creating ZFS file systems during the jumpstart process
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 add the zpool and zfs commands to my finish script. After a bit of tinkering around, here is what I came up with: This appears to work pretty well, and my boxes are now built and operational once the jumpstart process completes…
$ read more →OpenSolaris storage wishlist
A number of opensolaris communities have asked their members for feedback, and the list of technologies they would like to see added in the future. The storage community received a ton of feedback when they asked the community for the list of features they would like to have added to opensolaris, and this feedback was recently posted to the genunix wiki. If there are features you are interested in that don't appear on the list, I would highly recommend adding them. There are so many cool things underway (Comstar, CIFS client and server, NPIV support, pNFS, better remote replication, etc.) in the storage community, and it's awesome to see the storage project leaders reaching out to the community to get their ideas!
$ read more →Getting the Solaris format utility to work with an expanded LUN
A while back I wrote an article titled dynamically growing a Clariion LUN with Solaris. In the article I described how to update the VTOC on a UN that was resized on the storage array. One of my colleagues came to me a few weeks back and told me the procedure was not working, and he couldn't assign a new size (200GB in this case) to the device in format. This made me curious, so I started poking around…
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