zfs question

[Dick Hoogendijk]

  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) ?

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. ;-)

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.

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.

I hope to get some answers or good reading points.