Creating Storage Pools For Solaris ZFS

Hey there,

As a way of getting on to addressing Solaris 10 Unix issues beyond patching zones and migrating zones, today we're going to put together a slam-bang setup of a Solaris ZFS storage pool. For those of you unfamiliar with ZFS (and I only mention this because I still barely ever use it -- Lots of folks are stuck on either Solaris 8 or 9 and are having a hard time letting go ;), it simply stands for "Zettabyte File System."

A Zettabyte = 1024 Exabytes.
An Exabyte = 1024 Petabytes.
A Petabyte = 1024 Terabytes.
A Terabyte = 1024 Gigabytes.
A Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes.

And, at about this point the number scale makes sense to most of us. And, even though a Zettabyte seems like it's an unbelievably large amount of space, the next generation of operating systems will require twice as much RAM and disk space in order to respond to your key presses in under a minute ;)

Anyway, now that we have that out of the way, let's set up a ZFS pool.

First we'll create the pool, in a pretty straightforward fashion, using the zpool command and adding the disks (which can be in either cXtXdX notation, or specified by slice with cXtXdXsX notation. You can also use full logical path notation if you want (e.g. /dev/disk/cXtXdXsX). We'll assume two entire disks (unmirrored), create them and mount them for use:

host # zpool create MyPoolName c0t0d0 c0t1d0

Note that you can run "zpool create -n" to do a dry-run. This will allow you to find any mistakes you may be making in your command line as zpool doesn't "really" create the pool when you run it with the "-n" flag.

We also won't have to do anything extra to create the mount point, as it defaults to the name of the disk group. So, in this case, we would have a storage pool with a default mount point of /MyPoolName. This directory has to either not exist (in which case it will be automatically created) or exist and be empty (in which case the root dataset will be mounted over the existing directory). If you want to specify a different mount point, you can use the "-m" flag for zpool, like so:

host # zpool create -m /pools/MyPool MyPoolName c0t0d0 c0t1d0

And your ZFS storage pool is created! You can destroy it just as easily by running:

host # zpool destroy MyPoolName

or, if the pool is in a faulted state (or you experience any other error, but know you want to get rid of it), you can always force the issue ;)

host # zpool destroy -f MyPoolName

And you're just about ready to use your new "device." All you need to do is ( just like you would when mounting a regular disk device ) create a filesytem on your storage pool. You can do this pretty quickly with the zfs command, like so:

host # zfs create /MyPoolName/MyFileSystem

Note that the pool name directory is the base of the storage pool and your file system is actually created at the next level up. Basically, /MyPoolName is not your file system, but /MyPoolName/MyFileSystem is. And you can manage this file system, in much the same way you manage a regular ufs file system, using the zfs command.

Again, you can always opt-out and destroy it if you don't like it (here, as well, you have the option to "force" if you want):

host # zfs destroy /MyPoolName/MyFileSystem

Aside from "-f" (to force execution), the most common flags to use with "zfs destroy" are "-r" to do a recursive destroy or "-R" to recursively destroy all the regular descendants in the file system tree, plus all cloned file systems outside of your target directory (Be careful with that switch!)

We've only just brushed on getting started with zfs, but, hopefully, it's been somewhat helpful and, at the very least, readable ;)

Enjoy,

, Mike

linux unix internet technology