ZFS vdev naming?

Question

I have no idea what is the rationale behind naming the vdev (virtual devices) used while creating zfs pools in Solaris. Suppose, I have a disk c4d0, what is meant by c4d0p0 and c4d0s0? And, how would I know what to use with ZFS commands. I am terribly confused since I keep getting "invalid vdev specified". Any pointers?

Answer 1

c4d0s0 = controller 4, disk 0, slice 0

Answer 2

If you want the full disk to be used by ZFS you would want to use the main disk name, c4d0 in your case.

Answer 3

There is a very good article: "How Solaris disk device names work".
This might help.

Answer 4

ZFS Best Practices Guide recommends using whole disk for production setup - so do what X-Istence said - use c4d0 without the slice number. With ZFs you can throw away all you know about partitioning - they are so 1990s!