Can ZFS mirror an entire hard drive in OpenSolaris?

Question

I am upgrading an OpenSolaris development workstation and recently purchased two 500GB SATA hard drives expecting to use the features of the motherboard to mirror the drives. OpenSolaris doesn't recognize the drives when configured to be mirrored through the BIOS but it sees them just fine otherwise. Can ZFS mirror an entire drive and will the mirror be bootable if the primary fails?

Answer 1

The ZFS Boot Project FAQ seems to indicate that this is possible.

Answer 2

I got lucky with a blog post that came through an RSS feed refering to a tutorial that lead to the right manual. The answer is "yes" but the setup isn't automatic. If I am interpreting this part of the documentation correctly you can create a mirror and add the ability to boot from the second drive. Then in grub each drive will show as a boot choice.

Answer 3

You will need a fairly recent Solaris version (any from late 2007 - 2008 should do) for zfs booting from a mirror. I'm not sure about booting off raidz though. Check the documentation here.

Answer 4

zfs boot is in Sol10u5 or so and since nv9x in opensolaris. Simply use the console install and select ZFS when asked. ;)

Answer 5

Have a look at

http://www.castro.aus.net/~maurice/opensolaris/zfsbootmirror.html