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Q&A on Small Server Disk Layout

January 2008

This Q&A appeared in the OpenSolaris sysadmin-discuss mailing list and is reprinted with the writers' permission.

To join the sysadmin-discuss group, fill out the form at:

http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/sysadmin-discuss

Q: I'm new to the Solaris OS and am bringing a small server online that is outfitted with four SATA drives. I think what I want to do is mirror two boot drives via Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) and ZFS mirror the other two for data storage. From reviewing the docs I note:

1) I should have 4-6 metadb's for the boot mirrors spread between two disks so as to reach a quorum should a disk fail and not have to boot in single-user mode. So perhaps I should carve off a slice from the ZFS disks to accommodate.

2) However, ZFS docs recommend using whole disks rather than slices.

Can someone please offer some insight as to best practices in such situation?

A: What I'm doing on all my four-drive servers is the following:

First 16G on drives 1 and 2 mirrored using SVM for the OS (just a single / file system).

First 16G on drives 3 and 4 mirrored using SVM for an alternate BE for live upgrade. Once we get ZFS support, I can turn one of these mirrored pairs into a ZFS root.

Some space on each drive for swap, and a small partition on each drive to hold metadb's (2 metadb's on each drive).

Use the rest of the space (that would be most of it) as a mirrored concat ZFS pool. I'm not worried about the whole "disk vs. slices" thing -- I've usually been unable to tell the difference. This way you maximize the space available to data.

(For a two-drive system, the alternate BE is a second slice on each drive.)

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