Column for a Purdue Ambassador
ZFS Tech Talk / Demo
On February 21st I had the pleasure of giving a tech talk and demo session over the ZFS. This tech talk was meant to last only 50 minutes, yet, it lasted almost a whole half hour extra. About 25 individuals attended the session. It went so well that by the time I was ready for questions, we were already experimenting with the system. Questions and experiments lasted that extra 30 min.
My setup was a follows. I was not able to get Open Solaris running on my laptop. Even if it were, CRT out for the tech talk projector would not be an option. As a result, I stuck with Ubuntu Edgy Eft. Because linux's kernel is GPL and ZFS is CDDL, there is no native kernel support for ZFS. So I went ahead and installed the alpha version of the ZFS through the FUSE toolset. Although as alpha, many of the options do not work, the main components of ZFS work just fine. In order to test ZFS I went ahead and made 4 file disks with the command 'dd' as 'mkfile' does not exist for Ubuntu (at least to my knowledge).
On the whole, this was a very successful demo. Members of the Purdue Linux Users Group even said that they were going to switch their servers over to ZFS soon as they get a chance.
Posted at 09:47PM Feb 28, 2007 by jmicklos in Sun | Comments[3]
Posted by Marco on March 01, 2007 at 03:40 AM EST #
One problem I have found with vmware is that the support for using "real" disks is horrible.
I have a large LVM2 disk set, and created a couple of logical volumes to test zfs in a Nexenta (GNU+Solaris kernel) virtual machine. I was never able to get that to work even with the help of some unofficial patches on the web.
So then I resized things so I could separate out a physical disk and give that to vmware. For reasons I still don't understand, vmware could never keep the disk geometry straight. I could setup the disk, boot Nexenta, format it, and create a zpool with the disk. However, as soon as a I quit and restarted vmware, it would complain that the disk geometry had changed, and my zpool had to be recreated from scratch.
Xen might be better, but so far the hypervisor does not like my motherboard. Maybe KVM will work, or maybe ZFS-FUSE will finish. :)
Posted by Stanley Seibert on March 01, 2007 at 07:27 AM EST #
Posted by Marco on March 01, 2007 at 08:36 AM EST #