[OpenIndiana-discuss] Install OpenIndiana in an UFS root

[Peter Tribble]

On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 7:09 PM, Simon Toedt <simon.toedt at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 7:52 PM, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble at gmail.com>
> >
> > Seriously, though, I would love to know *why* you don't want
> > to install to ZFS. I can think of several reasons myself (which is
> > why I added the option to Tribblix) but this is quite a specialist
> > area, so what's your use case?
>
> 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.
>

I would agree with the reputation, but it's certainly not
well-deserved.

Even OI runs reasonably well in 1G, although you're going
to struggle to install it on anything smaller. (This is generally
true of most of the Illumos distros - the installer has a bigger
footprint than the minimum footprint of the installed OS.)

Tribblix will run a full desktop on ZFS root in 512M. (I don't
expect firefox to last very long, but that's not the fault of ZFS).
I would expect it to run as a dedicated server in significantly
less memory than that. Can you really get Linux VMs
on Amazon with 64M of memory or so?

Besides, you can run dozens of zones, so you don't need
that many VMs - or the per-instance overhead it entails.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/