ZFS test pool using solaris

admin Solaris 0

If you ever wanted to play around with ZFS but don’t want to use cold, hard disks then you can simulate disks and create a test pool. This is really handy if you just want to play around and want to save yourself the trouble.

Step 1 is to make a folder to hold your disks

root@solaris:~# mkdir /disks

Now populate it with a bunch of “disks” using the dd command

root@solaris:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/disks/disk1 bs=1024 count=100000                                   
100000+0 records in
100000+0 records out
root@solaris:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/disks/disk2 bs=1024 count=100000
100000+0 records in
100000+0 records out
root@solaris:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/disks/disk3 bs=1024 count=100000
100000+0 records in
100000+0 records out
root@solaris:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/disks/disk4 bs=1024 count=100000
100000+0 records in
100000+0 records out
root@solaris:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/disks/disk5 bs=1024 count=100000
100000+0 records in
100000+0 records out

In this case we created five disks because we want to implement raidz2.

root@solaris:~# zpool create testpool raidz2 /disks/disk1 /disks/disk2 /disks/disk3 /disks/disk4 /disks/disk5

Now we can se the pool status and it looks good. Have fun playing around.

root@solaris:~# zpool status testpool
  pool: testpool
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:

        NAME              STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        testpool          ONLINE       0     0     0
          raidz2-0        ONLINE       0     0     0
            /disks/disk1  ONLINE       0     0     0
            /disks/disk2  ONLINE       0     0     0
            /disks/disk3  ONLINE       0     0     0
            /disks/disk4  ONLINE       0     0     0
            /disks/disk5  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors