Okay, I've figured out enough on my own to work with this maybe -- ZFS will work with whole disks (best for production environments), disk partitions, and even individual files for raw space. Thus I can experiment and practice with ZFS pool configurations even though I can't have more than two raw disks to devote to ZFS. So that's mostly okay. I'm having trouble doing this still, but at the moment I'm assuming it's my unfamiliarity with Solaris admin rather than anything to do with Parallels. However, I do note that, after attaching two additional disk devices in Parallels, Solaris format takes forever (couple of minutes) to come up with the list of three disks it might work on (the system disk plus the two additional disks; c0d0, c1d0, and c1d1), and the console shows scsi warnings and errors for ide1, including timeouts, bus resets, and a read sector error. Is this normal when dealing with an unpartitioned drive, does anybody know?
Without meaning to be picky, "wait for v3" seems to be the stock answer from Parallels at the minute regarding most queries ( acpi? ), yet no indication is given of when it is coming. Considering that PD has just been shipped ( good job, btw, I also have a copy of PD ), and most of the improvements/fixes from that are being rolled into PW, I can't see it being anytime soon. As loyal as most here users are ( and I think Parallels users are ), an indeterminal wait for a paid upgrade ( that has been mentioned elsewhere on the forums ) is going to be testing them to the extreme.
Glad I have VMware to depend on. All of the windoze/linux upgrades have sort of fallen by the wayside to other priorities. There are a bunch of basic enhancements missing in Parallels as they seem to be going for the short term buck.
. Given that Parallels have been successful in gaining some short term bucks, the forecast for v3 to be delivered late Q3 should be somewhat more assured. .