Zones on UFS vs. ZFS

Decided to benchmark zones on UFS vs ZFS and found some surprising speed results. A while back I had fallen into the thinking that ZFS was too heavy of a file system and you wouldn’t benefit from running it on a sub 700mhz usparc III box. I guess this proves, since these tests were run on a Sun Ultra 2 2 x 300 MHz usparcII 1.25GB ram. UFS testing was done on a 9GB 10k rpm drive. ZFS was done on a raidz device made of 4x 9GB 10k rpm drives. The ZFS one has higher potential IO but has higher CPU requirements and both file systems were limited to the 20MB/s IO channel. Then I try and turn the table, and compare ZFS with compression on. Will it save space, at what cost speed/size?

Zone on top of UFS

# zonecfg -z test_ufs
test_ufs: No such zone configured
Use 'create' to begin configuring a new zone.
zonecfg:test_ufs> create
zonecfg:test_ufs> set zonepath=/ufstest
zonecfg:test_ufs> verify
zonecfg:test_ufs> commit
zonecfg:test_ufs>

# time zoneadm -z test_ufs install
Preparing to install zone .
Creating list of files to copy from the global zone.
Copying <2535> files to the zone.
Initializing zone product registry.
Determining zone package initialization order.
Preparing to initialize <1081> packages on the zone.
Initialized <1081> packages on zone.
Zone  is initialized.
Installation of these packages generated warnings: 
The file  contains a log of the zone installation.

real    22m22.402s
user    5m20.384s
sys     7m58.420s
#

Zone on top of ZFS

# chmod 700 /data/zone_zfs
# time zoneadm -z zone_zfs install
Preparing to install zone .
Creating list of files to copy from the global zone.
Copying <2535> files to the zone.
Initializing zone product registry.
Determining zone package initialization order.
Preparing to initialize <1081> packages on the zone.
Initialized <1081> packages on zone.
Zone  is initialized.
Installation of these packages generated warnings: 
The file  contains a log of the zone installation.

real    16m23.287s
user    5m18.917s
sys     9m28.814s
#

Enable Compression and put a zone on it.

# zfs  set compression=on data/zone_zfs2
# time zoneadm -z zone_zfs2 install
Preparing to install zone .
Creating list of files to copy from the global zone.
Copying <2535> files to the zone.
Initializing zone product registry.
Determining zone package initialization order.
Preparing to initialize <1081> packages on the zone.
Initialized <1081> packages on zone.
Zone  is initialized.
Installation of these packages generated warnings: 
The file  contains a log of the zone installation.
 
real    16m3.941s
user    5m19.210s
sys     9m32.384s
#

Yes ZFS with compression on is even faster.

# zfs list
NAME                   USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
data/zone_zfs         93.3M  26.0G  93.3M  /data/zone_zfs
data/zone_zfs2        43.4M  26.0G  43.4M  /data/zone_zfs2
data/zones             249M  26.0G   249M  /data/zones

# zfs list -o name,compressratio
NAME                  RATIO
data/zone_zfs         1.00x
data/zone_zfs2        2.27x
(and even has impressive compression ratio)

p.s. Just so people say that the initial UFS install be slower because of data caching, here is the UFS retested.

# time zoneadm -z test_ufs install
Preparing to install zone .
Creating list of files to copy from the global zone.
Copying <2535> files to the zone.
Initializing zone product registry.
Determining zone package initialization order.
Preparing to initialize <1081> packages on the zone.
Initialized <1081> packages on zone.
Zone  is initialized.
Installation of these packages generated warnings: 
The file  contains a log of the zone installation.

real    21m26.723s
user    5m22.573s
sys     7m54.183s
#

A little faster, but ZFS still blows it away.

For more blogs related to Zones, ZFS, OpenSolaris and Solaris.