Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Tue 19th Aug 2008 14:44 UTC, submitted by M-Saunders
How does OpenSolaris, Sun's effort to free its big-iron OS, fare from a Linux user's point of view? Is it merely a passable curiosity right now, or is it truly worth installing? Linux Format takes OpenSolaris for a test drive, examining the similarities and differences to a typical Linux distro.
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Member since:
2006-03-20
A zpool can be extended with vdevs as you like. vdevs can be single drives, RAID-Z arrays, mirrors, files or LUNs. The redundancy is defined by the vdev. Put a single drive vdev in a pool and you're playing with fire. You can turn single drive vdevs into mirrors, tho.
What you can't do is expand an existing RAID-Z vdev with more disks, you'd have to add a whole new RAID-Z vdev. The way it works to avoid the write hole makes expanding it a pain in the ass. The developers threw a lot of ideas out how this could be implemented, but it's a total non-priority for them and are encouraging third parties to give it a try if it's a priority. You can increase the size of an array tho by successively replacing each disk with a larger one.
Since ZFS is still evolving, their focus points more towards enterprise, where whole arrays are added to a storage pool to extend it, instead of expanding a single array (which is a dangerous operation).
For that matter, there's still work on implementing, testing and stabilizing some functionality (bp_rewrite) needed to perform the necessary operations safely.
Edited 2008-08-20 12:33 UTC