[geeks] ZFS sanity check

[Phil Stracchino]

Phil Stracchino wrote:
> Hey folks,
> I have a new server to bring up, and no prior experience with ZFS.  I'd 
> like to pick your brains a little.
> 
> The new box has twelve 300GB SATA disks.  I'm going to need a non-ZFS 
> boot volume for Solaris 10.  So for starters, I'm going to need a slice 
> of each of the first two disks for mirrored boot.  How much disk space, 
> realistically, am I going to need for Solaris 10?  Does this have to be 
> UFS, or are there other options?  If so, are any of them better?
> 
> Then I'm going to need some space for swap, of course, and then allocate 
> the rest of the space for ZFS.
> 
> That's where the questions come in.  Can I throw all the remaining space 
> on the first few disks, plus the whole of the untouched disks, into one 
> big zpool and RAIDZ2 across the lot?  Or do I need to group physical 
> volumes of the same sizes and add the groups to the zpool?  I know my 
> boot volume can't be ZFS yet.  Can my swap be on the zpool, and is it a 
> good idea to do so?  Am I better off to put the swap on separate 
> spindles from the boot disks to spread accesses, or put it on the same 
> spindles to minimize the number of disks ZFS is only partially managing? 
>  What else should I know?  What other factors should I be aware of that 
> can affect my filesystem planning?  Is there a better way of approaching 
> the whole problem?

Oh ...  forgot to add:  Am I better off trying to shoehorn in a 
completely separate boot disk and leave the array disks entirely for 
ZFS?  I do have one free 3.5" bay in the case that I could put a 
standalone boot disk into, and I just discovered two unused SATA ports 
on the motherboard.  (The 12 array disks are on a battery-backed 
controller.)


-- 
   Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
   alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
          Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                  It's not the years, it's the mileage.