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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing, January 13, 2010
This review is from: Solaris 10 ZFS Essentials (Paperback)
If, like myself, you are a Solaris 10 system administrator maintaining production systems ZFS looks like a killer feature. Live-Upgrade on snapshots, dynamically resizable storage pools, atomic writes and block level data integrity through checksums... What's not to like?
Unfortunately this is not the book you are looking for.
This seems to be aimed at the junior level system administrator dipping their toes in the ZFS pool.
While the author dedicates three chapters to OpenSolaris and Virtual Box (with screenshots, no less), there is no mention anywhere of ZFS send/receive, the ZIL (tuning it), zdb or running Oracle databases on ZFS.
You will be better served by printing out the Solaris documentation and reading the various websites dedicated to ZFS and solaris [...].
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
$40 for a 124-pg pamphlet (paperback, no less)?!, January 5, 2010
This review is from: Solaris 10 ZFS Essentials (Paperback)
On a positive note, the book covers exactly what the title claims: the essentials. But, I was expecting something more (purchased online, sight unseen). To be fair, my criticism has more to do with Sun's pricing policy than at the book itself. Perhaps, I live in an archaic, bygone pricing age.
This is the book for the administrator who needs a concise reference on how to set up and administer ZFS and how to address common failures, with each (every?) feature described and illustrated in a logical sequence. It includes both the basic and some of the less-frequent tasks (migrating UFS->ZFS pools, patching ZFS boot environments, etc.)
It's not, however, a thorough treatment of ZFS. It doesn't cover ZFS internals and implementation nor does it provide a wealth of insight into diagnostics and recovery from disasters other than a high-level treatment of "snapshot" restores and "resilvering" (disappointingly, the screenshot of a "spool status mpool" showing a "degraded" pool in chapter 2.7 refers the reader to the Sun site for what to do and the accompanying text merely echoes that advice!)
Oddly, the book doesn't address the use of ZFS with Solaris 10 zones (containers). For that level of detail, one must refer to the ZFS Administration Guide on the Sun web site (no charge). That information wasn't deemed "essential". However, ZFS with Virtual Box as a lab (i.e., practice) environment is demonstrated.
So, do I recommend the book? Yes, especially if you can get someone else to pay for it (e.g., your company).
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Don't Bother, January 31, 2010
This review is from: Solaris 10 ZFS Essentials (Paperback)
OK first off I'm a little upset that I got this in the mail unexpectedly as I ordered it some six months ago when it was supposed to ship in a month. But, there it was, so instead of sending it back I figured I would give the book a chance, but at $30+ for a super slim technical book, expectations were high.
I was very let down. I know of ZFS, I even played with it quickly one day on OpenSolaris, but I've never used it in production, etc. I've also read a few random articles on it over the past few years, it's had a lot of buzz. Thus I'd say I have a beginner's level understanding of ZFS, but this was still very dry and boring, and lacking on the details. Perhaps I should of read the description more closely, it should read something like this:
A quick read and rehash of the ZFS documentation with a few examples and very limited scope. The book does not cover high level design or how things work under the hood, which is the reason I bought the book.
I guess the title kind of says it all "ZFS *essentials*"; the essentials are all you will get. If it were $9.00, I'd give it 3 stars, but at $30+ it's ridiculous.
DO NOT BUY!
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