Well lots of poking around on the web today, and the possibility of being able to do a bare-metal install from a backup set for opensolaris with a ZFS root filesystem doesn’t appear to exist yet. A lot of forums raise the subject, but the answer seems to always be that it can’t be done yet.
The closest thing possible seems to be using zfs send to offload snapshots to a remote server, then for recovery to a standard clean install from the physical install media, then recieve back the remotely backed up filesystem. At which point I assume it needs to be manually cloned into a new rootfs and new opt filesystem as if a normal snapshot for cloning purposes, and rebooted to complete the recovery.
Well I don’t have a second solaris server so I won’t be zfs sending anything anywhere, and even if I had this is far to manual for a recover solution.
So I will keep opensolaris as a desktop system, and to portability test some of my linux software; but I will not be using it for anything important at the moment. And I probably won’t be doing much with it for now, so there are unlikely to be any more posts in the opensolaris category for a while.
So my setup at home is going to remain
- Linux servers, all able to be bare-metal re-installed from network boot. Losing no more than 24hrs of data as the Linux servers have backups pulled to the kickstart server every night. The kickstart server itself is backed up using the free mkCDrec application and can be bare-metal re-installed (tested, it works fine)
- A windows-XP desktop (yes I need one, for testing java code portability of stuff developed on Linux and website testing with windows browers) which is backed up using Acronis true disk image. So this also can be bare-metal installed for recover (ok, I havn’t tested a bare-metal restore from this but it’s a commercial product (off a magazine cover though) so should work)
- and now a opensolaris 2008.05 server. That I won’t put anything that needs backing up onto as without a bare-metal recovery process it would be stupid to use it for anything important (all right, looks like there is a TSM/Tivoli bare-metal restore available, possibly others, but they all cost a fortune. Useless for a cheapo server running a free OS)
Which from the looks of it still unfortunately makes my opensolaris server my backup Linux web server, just a simple tested kickstart away from being re-installed if my main server breaks.
So there will be no opensolaris posts here for a while unless I get it into a VM. I can’t get it to install into VirtualBox at all; might try to get it into qemu as that is where I squezed solaris 0606 into, although not trouble free.
