I have downloaded Solaris Express 27a and have installed taking the defaults which sets the whole disk as a Solaris disk. Now, I know that zfs can''t be used for a boot partition, or the swap partition. How do I get everything else onto a zfs partition. I suppose what I am saying is how do I mount / onto a zfs partition? Can this be done? Thanks This message posted from opensolaris.org
ZFS can be used for swap. An example is given in the man page. It should be easy to switch most of your space to ZFS. During installation you should have allocated most of your free space to an /export partition. Boot into single user mode, note the device name for /export in /etc/vfstab, comment out that line, use zpool (probably with the -f option) to make a new pool on the device, and reboot. This message posted from opensolaris.org
So let me see if I have got this right. This is what I tried so far. I installed onto 4 slices: / s0 as ufs swap s1 /pool s3 as ufs (this has most space & is to become zfs) /export/home s7 as ufs I have converted /pool to zfs OK. So are you saying that I can just create the other mount points into here, copy over the directory contents and aster out the corresponding lines in vsftab? Thanks once again This message posted from opensolaris.org
What else do you want to covert? You could relabel the disk to give your home space to pool, remake the ZFS, make a ZFS filesystem under pool with reserves and/or quotas if you want to control the space home can occupy, and either symlink /export/home to /pool/home, or usermod your user(s) to have home directories under /pool/home. You could also relabel and manage your swap as a ZFS volume, but that isn''t terribly exciting except that you''d be able to resize (although not dynamically as far as I know) your swap later. I don''t think much can be done about / now. It might be possible put /boot, /kernel, and /platform on a small UFS partition to boot from, but someone with more knowledge about ZFS and Solaris in general would have to comment. The point of my comment regarding vfstab is that you don''t need to mention your ZFS pool there. This message posted from opensolaris.org
Thanks once again. I suppose what I wanted to do is move / (or as much as is possible) onto zfs. My thinking is that the reliability of the overall machine would be improved if the operating system, application programs etc etc were also on zfs as opposed to just user data. This message posted from opensolaris.org