upgrade to OpenIndiana

Reading the requirements to upgrade from opensolaris to OpenIndiana was done following suggestions at http://wiki.openindiana.org:8080/display/oi/Installing+or+Upgrading

With one difference; It won't let me update even though no obsolete or failed packages were found.
The solution was to start from the commandline using the -f option: 
pfexec pkg image-update -fv

DOWNLOAD                    PKGS       FILES    XFER (MB)
Completed                  846/846 39788/39788  583.4/583.4

Removal Phase                            17782/17782
Install Phase                            26718/26718
Update Phase                             46466/46466
PHASE                                          ITEMS
Reading Existing Index                           8/8
Indexing Packages                            846/846
Indexing Packages                            846/846
Optimizing Index...
PHASE                                          ITEMS
Indexing Packages                            837/837

A clone of opensolaris-6 exists and has been updated and activated.
On the next boot the Boot Environment opensolaris-7 will be mounted on '/'.
Reboot when ready to switch to this updated BE.

sawtooth like data transmission

To improve performance it was mentioned to disable autotuning in Windows
(source: http://www.curuit.com/disable-tcp-auto-tuning-to-solve-slow-network-%28vista-%10-windows-7-%10-windows-2008%29-20070621145/)

The answer was to turn off tcp autotuning by running a cmd prompt as administrator & entering netsh tcp interface set global autotuning=disabled.

zdb command

Typing “zdb” with no arguments produces a list of pools and the storage devices they are using. Its a quick way to find out the serial number of a drive in a zpool

ZFS Raid10

Creating a Mirrored Storage Pool

To create a mirrored pool, use the mirror keyword, followed by any number
of storage devices that will comprise the mirror. Multiple mirrors can be
specified by repeating the mirror keyword on the command line. The
following command creates a pool with two, two-way mirrors:

# zpool create tank mirror c1d0 c2d0 mirror c3d0 c4d0

The second mirror keyword indicates that a new top-level virtual device is
being specified. Data is dynamically striped across both mirrors, with data
being replicated between each disk appropriately.

ZFS snapshot

machine0$ zfs snapshot mypool/myfs@now
machine0$ zfs send mypool/myfs@now > myfile
machine1$ zfs receive anotherpool/anotherfs@anothersnap < myfile

machine0$ zfs send mypool/myfs@now | ssh machine1 zfs receive anotherpool/anotherfs@anothersnap

Remove snapshot
zfs list -H -t snapshot
zfs destroy extra/backup@now

Windows recognised iscsi drive as RAW (no longer as NTFS)

After connecting my iscsi F-drive from one pc to another it was no longer recognised being formatted as NTFS so Windows asked if I wanted to format the F-drive (strange because I did not touch the data ...)
I went to the command prompt and did:
D:\> CONVERT F: /fs:ntfs
Where F: is a name of the drive you want to convert. It reported back that the drive was already NTFS.
I than ran: chkdsk F: /F which fixed it. After that it was immediately accessible as a normal Drive including all the data.

realtime monitoring your zfs pool

I use the following command to see real time transaction per 5 sec on my pool extra:

# zpool iostat -v extra 5

               capacity     operations    bandwidth
pool        alloc   free   read  write   read  write
----------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
extra       8.87G  28.4G    134      0  9.47M      0
  c7d0      8.87G  28.4G    134      0  9.47M      0
----------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----

(note: this was during a file copy over 100Mb/s LAN, reaching the max throughput of such a LAN)

To check local disk performance on my zpool I used:
# time (mkfile 2g /extra/foo)
real    2m7.349s
user    0m0.017s
sys     0m1.247s
(this creates a random file foo of 2GB  in my zpool extra and shows the time to complete)