Questions[openindiana](server)

I've been trying to install OpenIndiana on an HP DL320 G6 for a while now. I've got a 16GB HP SDHC card in the onboard slot and a SATA CD-Rom with oi-dev-151a-text-x86.iso burnt to a disc.

Installation seems to progress fine until I get to the actual installation portion. The SD card is picked up as a USB Disk. All the other configuration options are very 'normal' (there really aren't many options to begin with). Automatic NIC configuration.

The installer starts "Installing OpenIndiana", does a few steps, then gets to "Preparing disk for OpenIndiana installation" at 2%; and just sits there. I've let it sit for half an hour now ans still no progress.

How can I get past this issue?

PS> I'm not terribly familiar with OpenSolaris, but am with FreeBSD and *nix CLIs in general.

Update 1:
I've download and burnt the graphical installer (wow, it does not work with iLO). After finding a keyboard, mouse, etc I got the installer going. Stops in the same place, but now with the error: Cannot mount volume: Unable to mount the volume 'rpool1'. and and OK button. It appears the installer has no exception handling, as clicking OK results the installer hanging (the ads still rotate and the computer is otherwise responsive, but the installer does not progress).

I recently installed OpenIndiana because of an interest in ZFS. I like the feature-list of ZFS, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how to configure it. All of the documentation I have come across so far seems to presuppose an understanding of concepts like pools and file systems. Where can I find introductory-level information that defines these concepts in terms of ZFS?

I'm considering virtualizing a number of guests onto a single server running a recent port of KVM to Illumos. It sounds like my two primary options will be OpenIndiana and SmartOS. The distribution I will end up using needs to meet the following requirements:

• Need to be able to manage and customize via CLI (e.g. change ZFS filesystem/zvol options, attach an external drive and copy data to it, or automatically replicate data to an offsite server using zfs send/receive).
• Need to implement automated ZFS snapshots (e.g. using zfs-auto-snapshot).
• Need to be able to setup automatic email notifications if the health of the server degrades. Essentially, setup periodic ZFS scrubbing, monitor zpool, fault manager, and/or SMART issues, and email when problems are detected, etc. Manually setting this up is OK, as long as the OS lets me.
• Should handle Debian, Ubuntu, and Windows 2008 Server R2 guests with good stability and reasonable performance. These guests will be used in production.
• There should be a reasonable expectation that future releases will continue to be delivered - I don't want to get stuck using a dead-end product.
• Would be nice if it was easy to setup and has some sort of GUI, but this is optional.

Based on these requirements, which distribution would you recommend?

You can assume that this environment won't be deployed until the upcoming OpenIndiana stable release is released. Also, you can assume the server will use a Sandy Bridge Xeon E3-1xxx CPU, so that should take care of KVM compatibility.

Also, how robust/stable is the KVM port to Illumos on either of these distributions? Should I even consider KVM/Illumos for a production environment for now?

Where do I find statistics about how IO is divided between zfs datasets? (zpool iostat only tells me how much IO a pool is experiencing.)

All the relevant datasets are used through NFS, so I'd be happy with per export NFS IO statistics also.

We're currently running OpenIndiana

[edit]

It seems that operation and byte counter are available in kstat

kstat -p unix:*:vopstats_???????
...
unix:0:vopstats_2d90002:nputpage        50
unix:0:vopstats_2d90002:nread   12390785
...
unix:0:vopstats_2d90002:read_bytes      22272845340
unix:0:vopstats_2d90002:readdir_bytes   477996168
...

...but the strange hexadecimal ID numbers have to be resolved from /etc/mnttab (better ideas?)

rpool/export/home/jkj /export/home/jkj zfs rw,...,dev=2d90002 1308471917

Now writing a munin plugin to use the data...

Oracle dumped OpenSolaris in Fall 2010, and it is unclear if Oracle will continue to publicly release updates to ZFS, except maybe after they release their next major version of Solaris.

FreeBSD now has ZFS v28 available for testing.

But where did v28 come from? I notice that the main ZFS website does not show version 28 available. Has this website been abandoned? If so, where is the central website for the ZFS project, so that I can browse the repo, read the mailing lists, read the release notes, etc.

(I realize that OpenSolaris has been dumped by Oracle, and that they are limiting their ZFS releases to the community).