[OpenIndiana-discuss] Install OpenIndiana in an UFS root

[Marion Hakanson]

simon.toedt at gmail.com said:
> Running with less memory maybe? ZFS has a well-deserved reputation for being
> memory hungry, something which keeps Solaris and Illumos out of the cloud
> business - as the Amazon sales people say you can have six Linux VMs with
> ext4fs for one Solaris VM with ZFS in the same memory footprint. 

My experiences over the years since ZFS was first released contradict the
above statements.  I have bare metal servers running Solaris-10 with ZFS
root and only 1GB of RAM.  I have desktop machines running Solaris-10 and
OpenIndiana with ZFS root and only 2GB of RAM, and all of these systems
remain quite usable to this day.  I have several 4GB servers which started
out running Solaris-10 FCS on UFS, and were later converted to Solaris-10
on ZFS.  Those servers are doing the same jobs as before, are no slower,
and are far easier to manage, with ZFS.

By default, ZFS will attempt to use all available RAM, if it's not being
used for anything else, so it can look to the uninformed like it's "hogging"
all the RAM.  But it generally gives up that RAM if an application needs
more, and it's easy to set a limit on ZFS usage if needed.

These are my experiences, interpret them however you like.  When ext3/ext4 and
the rest have block-level checksums and snapshots, then I'll consider trusting
my and my customers' data to something other than ZFS.

Regards,

Marion