Marc Moreau, a student at the University of Lethbridge and member of the OSUM community, has been playing with ZFS in OpenSolaris, which he recently installed as a guest OS through VirtualBox. Marc has been curious to play in ZFS because he is interested in "seeing what it can really do."
Marc has written an impressive blog about his experience in playing with ZFS, and also compiled some great reference articles he used as a learning tool. His objectives in trying out the system were to:
- Install OpenSolaris on a Mirrored ZFS root partition
- Write random data to disk and see what ZFS does
- Learn some of the ZFS commands and how they work.
Marc began by learning how disks are labeled in Solaris and gives a quick summary in his writeup. He then successfully got his system up and running by following instructions in articles he links to in his original blog. After playing around with the different toys Marc noticed he had amassed some silent errors. He wasn't surprised and states "we caused the errors, expected them to occur, and now we are happily rolling along as if nothing ever happened."
Check out Marc's blog to get the complete rundown on his installation, setup and testing along with links to helpful articles for anyone who is also interested in playing around in ZFS. And thanks to Marc for writing such an informative review to share with the student community! Please continue to send your reviews or how-to articles through my page in OSUM or by e-mailing me at reviews[dot]program[at]sun[dot]com.
He goes over the download and installation process
(including a tip for those with network bandwidth issues), his take on
the initial look and feel as well as his suggestions for the areas of
work in near future. Check out Shiv Prakash's review 
