I guess I should've asked this at the outset - is it possible to get this formatted as zfs on root instead of UFS?  I know the idea of UFS is that it's great for single drives, and ZFS is better for 2 drives and up... but I want the features of compression and snapshots.
well, I got disconnected
so I didn't get to see if there were any answers to my previous questions... bummer.
that server I'm on really has one hell of a network connection!
(There were no answers to your questions.)
this is a cool setup.  booting via VNC works just fine.  I like the overall setup.  So far, this Thunder offering is meeting/exceeding my expectations!