I am running an Aberdeen iSCSI DAS. The DAS automatically exports configured Logical Volumes as iSCSI targets.

I am running the iSCSI initiator on a Solaris 11 Express box and connect to the target. zpool create works fine and so, it would seem, off we go.

However, I am wondering -- what about self-healing? Automatic activation of disk caches? and monitoring devices with zpool status? -- when all I see is the iSCSI exported volume, and not the constituent disks that make up the Volume.

Should I export each disk as a volume? And join them with 'zpool create'? But even then, is there a fundamentally different bundle of ZFS features that can be expected with iSCSI devices, versus physical devices?

Thanks!

As for how the zfs works, it should act as any local scsi drive.

1 members found this post helpful.

Then, that makes it a SAN, not a DAS.
ZFS will protect you against bit corruption that the disk array won't detect.
Depending on how the array is configured, you'll have multiple layers of raid which might not be optimal.
The command to activate them is sent when on iSCSI too. You might need some tuning with cache flushes depending on your array cache reliability: http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki...#Cache_Flushes

zpool status will report each volume as a low level device.I would do that.
As far as features are concerned, there are no fundamental differences.

1 members found this post helpful.

Very interesting. Quite correct on the SAN versus DAS -- Aberdeen calls it an iSCSI DAS and I nearly overlooked it because of that. Thanks for the detailed response. I will configure accordingly.

Here is a similar question, to a guy where he used exported data sets. And then he formated ZFS on it. ZFS could only detect, but not correct data corruption. Read this if you are interested. Quite interesting read
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thre...ssageID=502621