Solaris things...

I've been working with Solaris a lot, and we recently started with ZFS as well. Perhaps I'm missing something, but "top" & prstat dont report the correct amount of Memory free (RAM) on the machine when using zfs and neither does vmstat.

After some google searching, I found this helpful blog and thought I'd report. Thanks to "milek.blogspot.com" for this:

#!/bin/bash
#########
# Copied from http://milek.blogspot.com/2006/09/how-much-memory-does-zfs-consume.html
# to get correct reading of Free Memory
#

FREE=$(($(pagesize)*$(kstat -p unix:0:system_pages:freemem|awk '{print $NF}')))
ZIO_BUF=$(kstat -p zfs:0:arcstats:size|awk '{print $NF}')
FREE_MEM=$(((FREE+ZIO_BUF)/1024))
echo "Free Memory: $FREE_MEM MB"
FREE_MEM=$(((FREE+ZIO_BUF)/1024/1024))
echo "Free Memory: $FREE_MEM GB"

Next one was backups. We use Solaris 8 Branded Zones heavily to migrate off from our old Solaris environment. I started using ufsdump for backups, since this was not ZFS.

Well, trying to restore using ufsrestore, caused a ton of problems.

The simple

zoneadm -z s8zone install -a dumpfile

would give me weird errors such as " Sanity Check: Missing etc at /mnt"

Decided to use a ufsrestore, and that didnt help since zoneadm didn't know how to get it up.

Long story short, I did the following

1. Do a ufsrestore on to the disk
2. Used Zonecfg to create the configuration
3. Manually edited the /etc/zones/index file to modify the entry to match the backup version (with new name).

The index file would look like this:

global:installed:/
hostname:installed:/export/zones/app30qa:some id
hostname:installed:/export/zones/s8qa2flar:some id

This made zoneadm think that it was "installed" and I was finally able to boot up.