ZFS is great. Obviously. Generally when I do a server I install system on UFS and then mirror disks with SVM. I keep data and apps on ZFS. That’s nice, especially if ZFS is on a SAN. If something happens with the server I can move ZFS pools to a different server, if necessary.

The server build process is just a preference. You can easily install Solaris 10 on ZFS and be done with it.

Not so long ago I ran into situation, where I needed to add some swap. For various reasons I did not want to shuffle slicing on system disks while system is running. Nor could I add a swap file on one of UFS filesystems. So The last option I had was to use one of the zpools:

bash-3.00# zpool status
  pool: dudespool
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: none requested
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        dudespool   ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c2t1d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c2t2d0  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

I was going to create a file to use it as swap area:

bash-3.00# cd /dudespool
bash-3.00# mkfile 50M swap
bash-3.00# swap -a /dudespool/swap
"/dudespool/swap" may contain holes - can't swap on it.

So that was that. As it turns out, ZFS can not be used for swap files. You have to create zvol and swap on that.

bash-3.00# zfs create -V 50M dudespool/swapvol
bash-3.00# swap -a /dev/zvol/dsk/dudespool/swapvol
bash-3.00# swap -l
swapfile             dev  swaplo blocks   free
/dev/md/dsk/d10     85,10      8 1220928 1220928
/dev/zvol/dsk/dudespool/swapvol 181,1       8 102392 102392

There is more info on the net, just google it…