zfs question

[krad]

On 8 August 2010 13:27, Matthew Seaman <m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk>wrote:

> On 08/08/2010 12:43:48, Dick Hoogendijk wrote:
> >  Years back I ran FreeBSD, so I have some experience. The last couple of
> > years I ran Solaris, followed by Opensolaris. I am very satisfied.
> > However, considering the troubles after Oracle took over I have rebuild
> > my server system under FreeBSD-8.1 (now running as a virtual machine
> > under VirtualBox). All works very well and smooth so I'm going to
> > transfer this VM to a real seperate harddisk.
> >
> > I have a couple of questions:
> >
> > [1] Transfering the VM is best done using dump/restore I guess? (This
> > after a smallest creation of fbsd81 on the new harddisk) ?
>
> Yes, that would be a pretty good way of doing your vtophys migration.
>
> > My server has five disks: 1 PATA (160Gb), 2 SATA2 (500Gb) and 2 SATA2
> > (1Tb) The fist is disabled at the moment and the others are ZFS mirrors
> > under opensolaris. they are not usable for freebsd because the zfs
> > versions don't match. I will have to rebuild. ;-)
>
> % zpool list -H -o version zroot
> 14
> % zfs list -H -o version /
> 3
>
> Those are the latest available under 8-STABLE -- 8.1-RELEASE will be the
> same.
>
> > However, I'm a bit worried about the status of ZFS on FreeBSD-8.1 I
> > don't want my system to boot off ZFS like I have now on OpenSolaris-b134
> >
> > I think it is wisest to have the 160Gb IDE drive installed for FreeBSD
> > system drive w/ UFS2 and after that create two ZFS mirrors from my SATA
> > drives.
>
> Hmmm... well, booting FreeBSD off ZFS works perfectly well.  Apart from
> the lack of support in sysinstall, I can't see any good reasons to avoid
> it.  However, it's your system, and booting from UFS also works very
> well, so do whatever pleases you.
>
> There's more of a question over whether it's a good idea to put swap
> onto zfs -- I think the recommendation is still to prefer using a raw
> partition or gmirror for that.
>
> > Is ZFS (v14) ready for production on FreeBSD-8.1 and if yes, will I
> > still need special settings? The server system is 64bits and has 3Gb
> > memory.
>
> Yes.   It works very well.
>
> On amd64 you'll get a pretty reasonable setup out of the box (so to
> speak) which will work fine for most purposes.  Of course, if your
> system has particularly demanding IO patterns, then you may have to
> tweak some loader.conf or sysctl parameters to get the best results.
> But that's hardly unique to ZFS.
>
> > I hope to get some answers or good reading points.
>
> The FreeBSD Wiki entries on ZFS are very useful to read:
>
> http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS  (and the links from that page)
>
> especially the recipes for installing various different ZFS based
> configurations: eg. http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS
>
>        Cheers,
>
>        Matthew
>
> --
> Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                   7 Priory Courtyard
>                                                  Flat 3
> PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey     Ramsgate
> JID: matthew at infracaninophile.co.uk               Kent, CT11 9PW
>
>
if you want an easy zfsroot install use the pcbsd installer as it supports
zfs installation and can install plain freebsd