Solaris: November 2009 Archives

The xvm-3.4-source tree has obviously reached 3.4.2, as there is no more "pre", "rc..." or other suffixes in the version number.

After a svcadm enable milestone/xvm (and a reboot if you don't already booted the Xen Hypervisor) all daemons are coming up, it seems to work.

Windows 2008 R2 in a HVM identifies the BIOS as "3.4.2-xvm" (click on the picture on the right to enlarge it).

With Nevada 128 you'll get zpool/zfs version 22 with new features.

A noticeabe new feature is named "deduplication" which means that identical blocks are only kept once on disk reducing real storage use.

pascal@denver:~# zpool list
NAME    SIZE  ALLOC   FREE    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
rpool   135G  63.7G  71.3G    47%  1.00x  ONLINE  -
xvm     135G  29.3G   106G    21%  8.52x  ONLINE  -

The pool "xvm" has some nearly identical block volumes (zfs zvol) for Xen/xVM use and the result is noticeable.

Don't forget to allocate enough RAM to your Dom0-kernel when using Sun xVM.

In case your OpenSolaris snv_128 kernel does simply hang (replies to icmp echo requests but does not do much more than that...) after destroying a snapshot, a block device or a file system there's a simple solution:

Add RAM to your box resp. increase Dom-0 memory usage. In my case I had 1 GB Dom0 memory which was not sufficient.

With 2GB the pool mounted properly again. ZFS with deduplication needs RAM. Sad that there's no warning message including an abortion of the pool import in that case.