This guide is an introduction to configuring the Sun Fire X4500 server as a disk-cache media server for the Symantec Veritas NetBackup application. It provides an example of configuring the ZFS file system on the Solaris 10 08/07 OS and configuring the NetBackup 6.5 application to utilize the Sun Fire X4500 server as its media server.
Using Solaris on your laptop is a rewarding and sometimes intriguing experience…
I used Solaris Express for a while on my laptop because the official release of Solaris did not yet support my Relatek network card. I had settled on build 55 of Nevada, Solaris Express march 07 or so.
Wanting to upgrade to the developer Edition and check the latest wonders, I first tried to upgrade using the DVD. No luck. Not enough available space, said the ( new and more elegant ) installer. I need to reinstall then.
My setup is a little special since I have put all my data in a ZFS mirrored pool made of only one slice of my internal disk and an USB external disk that I connect now and then to my laptop to resilver so that I can keep a copy of my data at home.
Pool Extra = mirror (c0d0s7, c1t0d0p0)
I installed the Developer Edition without the smallest problem. I didn’t look very carefully, though and the installer reformatted my internal disk. No problem, I had expected to lose that branch anyway, I still have the external submirror. BUT when I plug it in, I get a nice error message :
The extra pool cannot be imported due to a wrong vdev configuration.
So Solaris sees that there is a pool available within my external disk but refuses to import it! After some worrying minutes during which anyone would start to like working with tape drives, I found the solution. During the reformatting of my internal disk, the installer had created a slice 7 with another size and had created a UFS filesystem on it. I guess that that was what confused zpool…
Removing slice 7 with format and reconnecting my external disk made my pool finally importable. I could then detach my internal slice from the pool and then recreate it.
Interestingly, my pool now occupies the entire capacity of my external disk while it was before limited to my internal slice’s capacity. I’ll need some extra tricks to get my mirror back…
Never underestimate an upgrade….
T: ZFSCurrently ZFS is only compiled as kernel module and is only available for i386 architecture. Amd64 should be available very soon, the other archs will come later, as we implement needed atomic operations.
Missing functionality.
- We don’t have iSCSI target daemon in the tree, so sharing ZVOLs via iSCSI is also not supported at this point. This should be fixed in the future, we may also add support for sharing ZVOLs over ggate.
- There is no support for ACLs and extended attributes.
- There is no support for booting off of ZFS file system.Other than that, ZFS should be fully-functional.
Read the official announcement
T: ZFS“This guide is intended to show a new user the capabilities of ZFS when coupled with Solaris Containers. It describes the assignment of a ZFS file system to a zone, and some of the ZFS administrative tasks possible in such a configuration. Assigning a file system to a zone gives a zone administrator full delegated control of the ZFS file system, enabling them to take snapshots, create sub file systems and perform other tasks without requiring the global zone administrator’s intervention.”
Zones Unofficial FAQ also updated to reflect on this.
A view of things to come, Jerry Jelinek, who recently moved to the Zones team, has recently submitted a proposal to implement two new functionalities for zones :
SUMMARY:
This fast-track enhances the Solaris Zones [1] subsystem
to address two existing RFEs. The first [2] enables non-global
zones to be relocated from one point on the filesystem to another;
this may involve actually moving the bits and requires changing the
associated metadata (the “zonepath”). The second [3] enables
administrators to rapidly provision new non-global zones, once
one has been set up, by allowing installation via copying from
another (non-global) zone.
Patch binding is requested for these sub-commands and the stability
of the interfaces is “evolving”.
DETAILS:
Updated May 5, 2007
Updated Apr 12, 2007
Updated Nov 7, 2006
Updated Dec 8, 2005
Basic Information : links giving some general information about ZFS.
System Administration : links providing info on how to manage ZFS
Extra Features : links clarifying the extra features of ZFS, those not found in UFS for instance.
Solaris 10 integration : links that illustrate how ZFS integrates with Zones, DTrace,…
T : ZFS
I found two interesting tidbits inEric Schrock’s last weblog entry :
- ZFS commands have been “completely rewritten”. Again !
- He cannot give a date for the official release. Sad. We’ll need to keep our rumoured unannounced date : Update 2, around September 05.