Transitioning From Oracle® Solaris 10 to Oracle Solaris 11.2

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Updated: December 2014
 
 

Preparing Disks for ZFS Storage Pools

Creating ZFS storage pools in Oracle Solaris 11 is similar to creating pools in Oracle Solaris 10. The following sections provide summary information about preparing disks for a ZFS root pool and non-root pools.

    Review the following general pool device configuration recommendations:

  • Create non-root pools by using whole disks, which are easier to manage than disk slices. For example, you can easily create a mirrored storage pool with four devices as follows:

    # zpool create tank mirror c0t1d0 c0t2d0 mirror c1t1d0 c1t2d0
  • When ZFS storage pools are created with whole disks, the disks are labeled with an EFI label rather than an SMI label. You can identify an EFI label by the lack of cylinder information in the disk label as displayed in the format utility, as shown in the following example:

    partition> print
    Current partition table (original):
    Total disk sectors available: 286478269 + 16384 (reserved sectors)
    
    Part      Tag    Flag     First Sector         Size         Last Sector
    0        usr    wm               256      136.60GB          286478302
    1 unassigned    wm                 0           0               0
    2 unassigned    wm                 0           0               0
    3 unassigned    wm                 0           0               0
    4 unassigned    wm                 0           0               0
    5 unassigned    wm                 0           0               0
    6 unassigned    wm                 0           0               0
    8   reserved    wm         286478303        8.00MB          286494686    
  • Whenever possible, create non-root pools with whole disks.

Oracle Solaris releases support advanced format disks in addition to traditional 512n disks. See Using Advanced Format Disks in Managing Devices in Oracle Solaris 11.2 .