ZFS Storage Pool Properties

Solaris 10 10/08 Release: ZFS storage pool properties were introduced in an earlier release. This release provides two properties, cachefile and failmode.

The following describes the new storage pool properties in this release:

• The cachefile property – This property controls where pool configuration information is cached. All pools in the cache are automatically imported when the system boots. However, installation and clustering environments might require this information to be cached in a different location so that pools are not automatically imported.

  You can set this property to cache pool configuration in a different location that can be imported later by using the zpool import -c command. For most ZFS configurations, this property would not be used.

  The cachefile property is not persistent and is not stored on disk. This property replaces the temporary property that was used to indicate that pool information should not be cached in previous Solaris releases.

• The failmode property – This property determines the behavior of a catastrophic pool failure due to a loss of device connectivity or the failure of all devices in the pool. The failmode property can be set to these values: wait, continue, or panic. The default value is wait, which means you must reconnect the device or replace a failed device, and then clear the error with the zpool clear command.

  The failmode property is set like other settable ZFS properties, which can be set either before or after the pool is created. For example:

  # zpool set failmode=continue tank # zpool get failmode tank NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE tank failmode continue local

  # zpool create -o failmode=continue users mirror c0t1d0 c1t1d0

  For a description of pool properties, see Table 4–1.