Trials and tribulations of using RAID and ZFS on a SunFire X2100 with Solaris 10 update 3.

First a bit of history. Last April, 2006, I purchased a SunFire X2100 box, barebones (no CD-ROM or drives). At the time I got by ok, as I purchased a nice little Seagate 500GB SATA drive from Fry's. Popped that in there and installed Solaris 10 update 1 from a USB CD-ROM drive. Have been running just fine with Solaris 10 zones/containers.

Recently, I purchased the internal DVD-ROM drive and SMDC Service Processor to be installed over the holidays. At the same time, I've purchased an identical Seagate 500GB SATA drive to allow me to mirror my drives and also use ZFS to mirror my data partitions.

Next, I've been using Solaris/SunOS/Unix for over 15 years, however I haven't done much with metadb's, Sun Volume Manager, ZFS, etc... I did receive a lot of help from the web in setting this up. Instead of creating one large blog with all the details, I'll document my steps as I go over the next few days. The references to the sites that helped me through this process are:

References

Matt Ingenthron's Blog – X2100 SMDC best practices...

Solaris Software RAID

Daniel Markle's Blog – Solaris 10 Partitioning, RAID, and ZFS