ZFS Demo

Thursday Feb 28, 2008

We are at our annual engineer training. One of the give aways in our bag was a USB hub with 3 USB drives and directions on how to create a ZFS pool with them.

It would have been really cool if the Sun logo was on the "right" side of the HUB and the USB sticks, so when everything is plugged in the logo faces up.

The directions point to a blog with a video. Unfortunately I can't get the video to load over the limited bandwidth at our training center. One of my co-workers, has given me the quick steps to do this.

I have hooked the hub and my USB drives up to my Solaris box. The rmformat will show us our USB sticks. We need the names of the devices to create the zfs pool.

Next we will create the pool:
#zpool create -f usbpool raidz c2t0d0p0 c3t0d0p0 c4t0d0p0

Check the status of the pool:
zpool status
pool: usbpool
state: ONLINE
scrub: none requested
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
usbpool ONLINE 0 0 0
c2t0d0p0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c3t0d0p0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c4t0d0p0 ONLINE 0 0 0

We can take the pool offline:
#zpool export usbpool
At this point we can unplug the USB hub

Next we can bring it back on-line by hooking the hub back up and running
#zpool import usbpool

Now if we move a large file, like a music file or a video to the pool, we can start playing the music or the video, and pull of the USB sticks out of the hub, and the music or the video won't miss a beat!

Small but powerful way to demo ZFS!

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Posted at 08:50AM Feb 28, 2008 by acworkma in Sun
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