[geeks] solaris questions

[Joshua Boyd]

On Apr 5, 2008, at 2:47 AM, Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> Some questions about Solaris:
>
> ZFS:
>
> Is there any benefit to running ZFS on a single drive, or two  
> dissimilar drives?

ZFS on a single drive will still apply robust error checking.  It  
won't be able to correct on-disk errors, but it can at least keep  
them from being silent.

Also, it seems to be pretty fast on a single drive.
>
> Is there a way to have / be UFS to it can boot, but install the  
> rest of the system (/usr, /var, etc) on ZFS?  I didn't see an  
> option in the installer to make that choice.

I haven't seen any install choice for that.  I think you can boot in  
single user mode and move stuff around after the initial install, but  
I haven't tried moving all of var or usr, only sub directories under  
them.

> How do you run ZFS on hardware RAID?  In the future I am thinking  
> of a nice 3Ware RAID card.  I like the hardware RAID because it  
> reduces the overhead bandwidth and so far I've found the good cards  
> very fast, even some cheaper ones.

I think it would be worth benchmarking it both ways.

> Can you turn off ZFS's RAID features and just use it to slice up a  
> RAID array and manage it, or will it possibly "compete", and the  
> double-layer of RAID cause problems?

I believe that running ZFS on a hardware raid is just like running it  
on a single drive.  It seems to me that this must be supported for  
ZFS to work correctly on a SAN.

BTW, I do run ZFS on top of a svm mirror on top of one machine (at  
the time of install there was a bug in the IDE driver that ZFS  
aggravated, so this was the work around), so ZFS can definitely run  
on top of other RAID systems.  Also ZFS can run on top of iSCSI.

> Zones:
>
> How can you create a zone without all the packages in the global  
> zone being put in it?
>
> Is there a sane way to handle Blastwave packages and dependencies  
> with regard to zones?
>
> Ditto pkgsrc, if anyone has tried that.

Sorry, I'm a real newbie with Zones.

> Compilers:
>
> What's the best approach for having a compiler installed on the  
> system that can be used by the zones and which will also work with  
> the package systems like pkgsrc, or your own home-grown stuff?

I think that installing SunStudio on the main OS is the best bet.   
For things that just won't work with it, I'm thinking to stick GCC in  
a zone dedicated just to compiling stuff with GCC>

> Package system:
>
> I have some packages in SFW that duplicate that is in CSW and  
> pkgsrc.  Not all packages I want can be found in one packages system.
>
> For example, Sun's apache is a requirement for one of the packages  
> I use, but Blastwave also has Apache as a dependency for one of its  
> packages.
>
> I don't want N copes on my system.

I just put up with N copies, although I don't have multiple copies of  
anything as large as Apache.