About 3 weeks ago, I was going to setup a Solaris box we acquired for a particular task in the office. I chose this box and Solaris since I had read great things about ZFS. In the past I would play the role of ‘early adopter’ and try things out when they became available. Unless I absolutely need a particular technology, I now take the ‘late adopter’ role when we’re talking about Operating Systems. Too many companies release tech that isn’t stable.

At any rate, I remember the original ZFS release into Solaris. It was announced, and then it was held back because it wasn’t ready. No problem, I can wait. I thought that by now, after all the hype, things would be perfect. We would finally have a decent raid and filesystem from Sun without worrying about the capabilities of DiskSuite or shelling out $$ for Veritas. It took Sun a big kick in the head to figure out that, now, 10 years later, they needed to innovate.

So I go through the hassle of downloading Solaris (more on that later). I start the install. Things are going smoothly. I get to the partitioning step, I’m ready to see the magic. I have two hot-swappable 18 gig drives in this machine. I want to setup a mirroring system.

Fzzz. Show stopper. No ZFS. Where is the ZFS? I downloaded the latest Solaris… what is up?

Ah – after hitting Wikipedia’s Article on ZFS, I notice in the limitations:

ZFS is currently not available as a root filesystem on Solaris 10, since there is no ZFS boot support.

No boot support!

I stopped the project right there. The whole reason I wanted to use Solaris was to be able to have a reliable, high-uptime system… and that means RAID. No boot into UFS and then mount ZFS.. I want a real RAID

Oh well, I’ll try again next year.

I sure hope Apple users will be able to boot ZFS when they get it in Leopard.

Update Some people have asked? Why not download OpenSolaris which just added this? Ah, yeah – see ‘late adopter’ above. Then read this “Where do I download OpenSolaris”?