Hi Folks, Im in a shop thats very resistant to change. The management here are looking for major justification of a move away from ufs to zfs for root file systems. Does anyone know if there are any whitepapers/blogs/discussions extolling the benefits of zfsroot over ufsroot? Regards in advance Rep -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
On 03/31/10 05:11 PM, Brett wrote:> Hi Folks, > > Im in a shop thats very resistant to change. The management here are looking for major justification of a move away from ufs to zfs for root file systems. Does anyone know if there are any whitepapers/blogs/discussions extolling the benefits of zfsroot over ufsroot? > > Regards in advance > Rep >Hi, Benefits of ZFS boot are described in a number of places, such as the ZFS boot discussion at http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+zfs/boot and on BigAdmin, along with a lot of "how to" documents. Some other URLs you may find helpful: http://blogs.sun.com/storage/entry/zfs_boot_in_solaris_10 http://blogs.sun.com/tabriz/entry/zfs_boot http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/submitted/zfs_root_clone.jsp FWIW I touched on it briefly in a blog entry primarily on function added after initial ZFS boot support) http://blogs.sun.com/jsavit/entry/zfs_live_upgrade_and_flash and at http://blogs.sun.com/jsavit/entry/a_new_look_at_an Here are a few of the specific reasons: - You have a pool of storage and don''t have to worry about creating slices for /, /var and so forth and finding out you didn''t create them with enough space (or with too much). Putting this another way, you don''t have to preallocate file systems, and they only consume as much space as they need. - If you have a volume manager - you no longer need it, which reduces complexity and possibly cost. - You get data integrity and mirroring without effort - something you really want on a boot device. It''s just a lot easier. - Creating an alternative boot environment for Live Upgrade is much faster and easier, cloning existing boot environments and only storing changed bits instead of duplicating all of them. You can have as many boot environments as you feel like instead of being limited by the number of slices. ZFS lets you leverage snapshots and clones to speed up and simplify system management. Initial lucreate is faster, and subsequent ones are MUCH faster. and perhaps my favorite: - on-disk data consistency. No more fsck, ever! I hope that''s helpful. regards, Jeff -- Oracle Email Signature Logo Jeff Savit | Principal Sales Consultant Email: jeff.savit at oracle.com | Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/jsavit Oracle North America Commercial Hardware Infrastructure Software Pillar 2355 E Camelback Rd | Phoenix, AZ 85016 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100331/89673259/attachment.html> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: graphics1 Type: image/gif Size: 658 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100331/89673259/attachment.gif>
Brett wrote:> Hi Folks, > > Im in a shop thats very resistant to change. The management here are looking for major justification of a move away from ufs to zfs for root file systems. Does anyone know if there are any whitepapers/blogs/discussions extolling the benefits of zfsroot over ufsroot? > > Regards in advance > Rep >I can''t give you any links, but here''s a short list of advantages: (1) all the standard ZFS advantages over UFS (2) LiveUpgrade/beadm related improvements (a) much faster on ZFS (b) don''t need dedicated slice per OS instance, so it''s far simpler to have N different OS installs (c) very easy to keep track of which OS instance is installed where WITHOUT having to mount each one (d) huge space savings (snapshots save lots of space on upgrades) (3) much more flexible swap space allocation (no hard-boundary slices) (4) simpler layout of filesystem partitions, and more flexible in changing directory size limits (e.g. /var ) (5) mirroring a boot disk is simple under ZFS - much more complex under SVM/UFS (6) root-pool snapshots make backups trivially easy -- Erik Trimble Java System Support Mailstop: usca22-123 Phone: x17195 Santa Clara, CA Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800)
On 03/31/10 17:53, Erik Trimble wrote:> Brett wrote: >> Hi Folks, >> >> Im in a shop thats very resistant to change. The management here are >> looking for major justification of a move away from ufs to zfs for >> root file systems. Does anyone know if there are any >> whitepapers/blogs/discussions extolling the benefits of zfsroot over >> ufsroot? >> >> Regards in advance >> Rep > I can''t give you any links, but here''s a short list of advantages: > > (1) all the standard ZFS advantages over UFS > (2) LiveUpgrade/beadm related improvements > (a) much faster on ZFS > (b) don''t need dedicated slice per OS instance, so it''s far simpler to > have N different OS installs > (c) very easy to keep track of which OS instance is installed where > WITHOUT having to mount each one > (d) huge space savings (snapshots save lots of space on upgrades) > (3) much more flexible swap space allocation (no hard-boundary slices) > (4) simpler layout of filesystem partitions, and more flexible in > changing directory size limits (e.g. /var ) > (5) mirroring a boot disk is simple under ZFS - much more complex under > SVM/UFS > (6) root-pool snapshots make backups trivially easy > > >ZFS root will be the supported root filesystem for Solaris Next; we''ve been using it for OpenSolaris for a couple of years. - Bart -- Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance bart.smaalders at oracle.com http://blogs.sun.com/barts "You will contribute more with mercurial than with thunderbird."
On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 7:53 PM, Erik Trimble <erik.trimble at oracle.com> wrote:> Brett wrote: >> >> Hi Folks, >> >> Im in a shop thats very resistant to change. The management here are >> looking for major justification of a move away from ufs to zfs for root file >> systems. Does anyone know if there are any whitepapers/blogs/discussions >> extolling the benefits of zfsroot over ufsroot? >> >> Regards in advance >> Rep >> > > I can''t give you any links, but here''s a short list of advantages: > > (1) all the standard ZFS advantages over UFS > (2) LiveUpgrade/beadm related improvements > ? ? ?(a) ?much faster on ZFS > ? ? ?(b) ?don''t need dedicated slice per OS instance, so it''s far simpler to > have N different OS installs > ? ? ?(c) ?very easy to keep track of which OS instance is installed where > WITHOUT having to mount each one > ? ? ?(d) ?huge space savings (snapshots save lots of space on upgrades) > (3) much more flexible swap space allocation (no hard-boundary slices) > (4) simpler layout of filesystem partitions, and more flexible in changing > directory size limits (e.g. /var ) > (5) mirroring a boot disk is simple under ZFS - much more complex under > SVM/UFS > (6) root-pool snapshots make backups trivially easy > > > > -- > Erik Trimble > Java System Support > Mailstop: ?usca22-123 > Phone: ?x17195 > Santa Clara, CA > Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800)I don''t think 2b is given enough emphasis. The ability to quickly clone your root filesystem, apply whatever change you need to (patch, config change), reboot into the new environment, and be able to provably back out to the prior state with easy is a life saver (yes you could do this with ufs, but is assumes you have enough free slices on your direct attached disks, and it takes _far_ longer simply because you must first copy the entire boot environment first -- adding probably a few hours, versus the ~1s to snapshot + clone).
On Wed, March 31, 2010 21:25, Bart Smaalders wrote:> ZFS root will be the supported root filesystem for Solaris Next; we''ve > been using it for OpenSolaris for a couple of years.This is already supported:> Starting in the Solaris 10 10/08 release, you can install and boot from a > ZFS root file system in the following ways:http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5461/zfsboot-1
On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 9:06 AM, David Magda <dmagda at ee.ryerson.ca> wrote:> On Wed, March 31, 2010 21:25, Bart Smaalders wrote: > >> ZFS root will be the supported root filesystem for Solaris Next; we''ve >> been using it for OpenSolaris for a couple of years. > > This is already supported: > >> Starting in the Solaris 10 10/08 release, you can install and boot from a >> ZFS root file system in the following ways: > > http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5461/zfsboot-1I suspect it was meant that for new installs of Solaris.Next, ZFS will be the only supported option (i.e. you can upgrade w/ UFS root, but not do new installs with UFS root). I thought I saw comments to that effect in the past (but I don''t, nor ever have worked for Sun/Oracle, so this is just my recollection of past conversations).