I went into the office today to start some testing on how we would do the migration from Veritas to ZFS, the testing went fine. I’m not privy to the cost of the Veritas license, I think though that it’s into six figures. This is an annual cost so there are significant savings to be made here, it’s just a matter of getting the business users on board as there will be a requirement for outages on almost all the systems.
The process is pretty simple, simply create enough ZFS disk for the system and move the data over. I used Rdiff-Backup which I had to install along with it’s dependencies to copy the data, setting this up didn’t take to long.
The test system will only require a few hours work to do, after that the data sync will be the biggest part of it. Obviously this will be more difficult on the larger systems due to the time that it is likely to take. Still thats why I was in the office, getting some rough timings for the work.