Solaris 10 What's New

The Solaris ZFS File System

This file system enhancement is new in the Solaris 10 6/06 release.

This Solaris update release includes Solaris ZFS, a new 128-bit file system. Solaris ZFS provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. Solaris ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology. Rather, Solaris ZFS is a fundamentally new approach to data management.

Solaris ZFS uses a pooled-storage model that completely eliminates the concept of volumes. Thus, Solaris ZFS eliminates the associated problems of partition management, provisioning, and growing file systems. Thousands of file systems can all draw from a common storage pool. Each system consumes only as much space as actually needed. The combined I/O bandwidth of all devices in the pool is available to all file systems at all times.

All operations are “copy-on-write” transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid. Every block has a checksum, so silent data corruption is impossible. In addition, the data is self-healing in replicated configurations. This feature means that if one copy is damaged, Solaris ZFS detects the damage and uses another copy to repair the damaged copy.

Solaris ZFS Easy Administration

For system administrators, the greatest improvement of Solaris ZFS over traditional file systems is the ease of administration.

Solaris ZFS takes a single command to set up a mirrored storage pool and file system. For example:


# zpool create home mirror c0t1d0 c1t2d0

The preceding command creates a mirrored storage pool named home and a single file system named home. The file system is mounted at /home.

With Solaris ZFS, you can use whole disks instead of partitions to create the storage pool.

You can use the /home file system hierarchy to create any number of file systems beneath /home. For example:


# zfs create home/user1

For more information, see the zpool(1M) and zfs(1M) man pages.

In addition, Solaris ZFS provides the following administration features:

For more information, see the Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

ZFS Web-Based Management

The Solaris 10 6/06 release includes the Solaris ZFS web-based management tool, which enables you to perform much of the administration that you can do with the ZFS command line interface. You can perform the following administrative tasks with the Solaris ZFS administration console:

You can access the Solaris ZFS administration console through a secure web browser at the following URL:


https://system-name:6789

If you type the appropriate URL and are unable to reach Solaris ZFS administration console, the server might not be started. To start the server, run the following command:


# /usr/sbin/smcwebserver start

If you want the server to run automatically when the system boots, run the following command:


# /usr/sbin/smcwebserver enable

Note –

You cannot use the Solaris Management Console (smc) to manage ZFS storage pools or file systems.


ZFS and Solaris Zones

The Solaris Zones partitioning technology supports Solaris ZFS components, such as adding Solaris ZFS file systems and storage pools into a zone.

For example, the file system resource type in the zonecfg command has been enhanced as follows:


zonecfg:myzone> add fs
zonecfg:myzone:fs> set type=zfs
zonecfg:myzone:fs> set dir=/export/share
zonecfg:myzone:fs> set special=tank/home
zonecfg:myzone:fs> end

For more information, see the zonecfg(1M) man page and the Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

Solaris Installation Tool Support of ZFS File Systems

This release supports the following Solaris installation tools:

New Solaris ACL Model

Solaris ZFS implements a new ACL model. Previous versions of the Solaris OS only supported an ACL model that was primarily based on the POSIX ACL draft specification. The POSIX-draft based ACLs are used to protect UFS files. A new model that is based on the NFSv4 specification is used to protect Solaris ZFS files.

The new ACL model :

The recently revised chmod(1) man page adds many new examples that demonstrate usage with Solaris ZFS. The acl(5) man page has an overview of the new ACL model. In addition, the Solaris ZFS Administration Guide provides extensive examples of using ACLs to protect ZFS files.