If you’ve ever built large filesystems on linux with hundreds of disks using ext3 and LVM you will appreciate the very nice way zfs works on opensolaris. Having had a play with zfs – I am jealous.
If you would like to see more on zfs, the following 3 videos are an excellent presentation and demonstration of zfs. Thanks to Bill and Jeff and Sun for making this available.
ZFS : The last word in filesystems Pt 1
I don’t know much about solaris in general so I thought i’d have a look at the upcoming release of opensolaris . Being inquisitive can often get you into trouble 
Anyway, I fearlessly downloaded the Preview 2 iso and fired it up in vmware-server. It’s no where near as slick looking as say an OpenSuSE Linux install, but it’s certainly come quite a way since I last looked at it. It’s a Live CD environment that lets you have a bit of a look before deciding to install – as this was a vmware guest I just went ahead and installed it.
The install went through pretty cleanly, except there was no stinking network detected and of course we all know we must have a stinking network.
I eventually discovered that you need to tell vmware to emulate an e1000 device rather than the usual pcnet32 style device i’d come to know and love in linux.
To do this, just crack open your favourite editor called vi and edit your guest vmx file and add
ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000″
The network card should be automagically detected on the next reboot and order will return to the universe.
Now that we have a network I can actually check to see what this puppy can do and i’m sure I can waste some more of this elusive thing called ’spare time’ – hey at least I wasn’t logged onto work doing crap paperwork so that’s got to be a good thing 
