ZFS is easier usually; but if you don't have two drives (to mirror the
root storage pool) it may not be worth it. It creates one or more
storage pools out of possibly multiple disks (or disk partitions),
which have to be mirrors for the one it boots from, but can be a
variation of RAID 5 for other pools. Or other arrangements too, but
you really want a redundant arrangement; that way you can just replace
a failed drive and keep going. And never an fsck needed (or even
possible), the way it handles updates eliminates the need for that.
As I recall, if you're not using ZFS, on x86 Solaris typically uses a single
partition, and creates its own slices within that. So you still only need
one disk partition big enough for all of it. The installer will do or
prompt for the rest. You could of course have more than one partition, such
as if you wanted to mirror them with Disk Suite (or Solaris Volume Manager,
or whatever it's called now).
/tmp is by default tmpfs (virtual memory, not directly disk, although if
you are short on RAM, you should at LEAST be generous with swap). Not a bad
idea to give /tmp and other tmpfs filesystems (/var/run) a size=# (like 512m)
boot option, so they can't run out out of virtual memory. But anyway you
likely will not need a separate partition or slice for /tmp.
As to sizes, it entirely depends on how much you install, how much data
you'll have, how much extra software (opencsw packages, for example). Mine
are probably NOT a useful example, since (a) I'm using zfs, and (b)
most of my Solaris is SPARC with lots of stuff on it; the rest is x86 VMs
with very little on them (just for testing, usually down), and I don't
recall whether I did a full install or not.
Still, here's one of my x86 VMs; remember, it's zfs (which doesn't
make that much difference on total space, but is more flexible about
where the space can be used); looks like I have about 14.4GB in use total
(from the zfs pool stats, not shown). Looks like I have at least most of
the software installed (including desktop stuff, which is big, and some
opencsw packages, and the Sun C compiler packages), and not much in the
way of data, etc. /opt isn't a separate partition, although that's up to you.
# df -h -F zfs;df -h -F tmpfs
Filesystem Size Used Available Capacity Mounted on
rpool/ROOT/s10x_u11wos_24a
29G 10G 15G 41% /
rpool/ROOT/s10x_u11wos_24a/var
29G 665M 15G 5% /var
rpool/export 29G 32K 15G 1% /export
rpool/export/home 29G 1.6G 15G 10% /export/home
rpool 29G 42K 15G 1% /rpool
swap 2.0G 1.0M 2.0G 1% /etc/svc/volatile
swap 2.0G 40K 2.0G 1% /tmp
swap 2.0G 44K 2.0G 1% /var/run
Looks like I didn't bother with a size= limit on the tmpfs filesystems
(the last three). So there's really 2.0G free at the moment for all of
them, not for each!
Still, those just reflect what I had available, they don't really take
into account any attempt at being smart about sizing. Since it's a VM,
it's really just one big fat file on the host anyway (which has a 1TB SSD,
so what do I care if there's a 30GB file on there for the disk image). The
only Solaris I have that's not using ZFS is Solaris 9 on a (SPARC)
Sun Blade 100, and it's using Disk Suite, with mirroring across two disks,
and just / and /export partitions (for all intents and purposes), and with
a lot of data on there relative to the disk size. So it's a pretty useless
example.
If your hardware is up to the challenge, and if only you had an extra
disk drive (for a mirror for zfs), you'd do MUCH better to run Solaris
11. Way easier to install additional software, updates, etc. However,
unless you can afford a maintenance contract, you will ONLY get an
update when they bump version (11.3 to 11.4, to 11.next, for example),
and you will NOT be able to take it as an update, you'll have to do a
full re-install. Same with Solaris 10, as far as that goes; without a
maintenance contract, no patch access. (but patches on Solaris 10 and earlier
aren't much fun to install anyway...although if this will have Internet
connectivity, you maybe shouldn't run Solaris at all if you can't afford
a maintenance contract, since un-updated software is just begging to get
hacked).
Post by gendilaThank you. I need that 1 gb on the first hdd otherwise I can't boot it
as os needs the first partition to install boot records.( plz don't
mind, I know this much as i tried to install solaris on the second hdd
on 22 gigs but couldn't boot. My sys is multiboot (slack and freebsd).
I don't know anything about zfs as I never used it before so it'd be
risky to create zfs. Plz tell me how much space I should create for the
aforementioned slices (/var, /opt, /tmp, /usr and /export/home/