ZFS NAS configuration question

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 4:43 AM, Aristedes Maniatis <ari at ish.com.au> wrote:

>
> On 31/05/2009, at 4:41 AM, Dan Naumov wrote:
>
>  To top that
>> off, even when/if you do it right, not your entire disk goes to ZFS
>> anyway, because you still do need a swap and a /boot to be non-ZFS, so
>> you will have to install ZFS onto a slice and not the entire disk and
>> even SUN discourages to do that.
>>
>
> ZFS on root is still pretty new to FreeBSD, and until it gets ironed out
> and all the sysinstall tools support it nicely, it isn't hard to use a small
> UFS slice to get things going during boot. And there is nothing wrong with
> putting ZFS onto a slice rather than the entire disk: that is a very common
> approach.
>

It's worth noting that there are a few sensible appliance designs...
(although as a ZFS server, you might want 4, 8 or 16G in your "appliance").

You could, for instance, boot from flash.  If your true purpose is an
appliance, this is very reasonable.  It means that your appliance "boots"
when no "disks" are attached.  Useful to instruct the appliance user how to
attache disks and do diagnostics, for instance.

My own ZFS is  5x 1.5TB disks running on a few week old 8-CURRENT.  I gave
up waiting for v13 in 7.x.  Maybe I should have waited.  But I've avoided
most of the most recent foo-for-ah by not tracking current incessantly.  If
I was installing new, I'd probably stick with 7.x for a server... for now.
I must admit, however, that the system seems happy with 8-CURRENT.

The system boots from a pair of drives in a gmirror.  Mot because you can't
boot from ZFS, but because it's just so darn stable (and it predates the use
of ZFS).

Really there are two camps here --- booting from ZFS is the use of ZFS as
the machine's own filesystem.  This is one goal of ZFS that is somewhat
imperfect on FreeBSD at the momment.  ZFS file servers are another goal
where booting from ZFS is not really required and only marginally
beneficial.