more below... On May 3, 2010, at 2:22 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
>> From: Cindy Swearingen [mailto:cindy.swearin...@oracle.com] >> Sent: Monday, May 03, 2010 12:58 PM >> >> Hi Ned, >> >> Yes, I agree that it is a good idea not to update your root pool >> version before restoring your existing root pool snapshots. >> >> If you are using a later Solaris OS to recover your pool and root pool >> snapshots, you can alway create the pool with a specific version, like >> this: >> >> # zpool create -o version=19 rpool c1t3d0s0 >> >> I will add this info to the root pool recovery process. >> >> Thanks for the feedback... > > But if you unfortunately had a necessity to upgrade your rpool version ... > Such as I recently did, when my replacement log device was 1Mb smaller than > the device it was intended to mirror ... The most graceful way I can think > to handle that zpool upgrade would be to also install solaris/opensolaris to > a removable disk, and *test* that you can boot from it. This way, when you > update your primary OS and then update the zpool ... You can also update the > removable OS, and rest assured you've got a bootable removable media which > supports the necessary zpool version, so you have actually some option > available to restore rpool in the event of failure. > > But this technique sounds like it leaves a lot of possible failures... Such > as ... Once you register your original Solaris 10 OS for updates, are you > unable to get updates on the removable OS? This is not a problem on Solaris 10. It can affect OpenSolaris, though. > Does sparc support booting removable hard disks? Yes, though it is trivial (and easier) to boot from the net. > And even on the x86, which support booting the removable media, I've > certainly seen little "gotchas" such as "Well, it *should* work..." well... maybe you get what you pay for? :-) > And I recently had a server where I was able to install Solaris 10, but > couldn't install opensolaris due to driver incompatibility. So while that's > presumably unusual, it's certainly nonzero. Be sure to file a bug. That said, there has been a move recently to EOF some old drivers. If you file a bug against archaic hardware drivers, don't be surprised if they are EOF. > So I think the take-away knowledge here is: If you *must* upgrade your > rpool version, and you want to be able to restore your rpool from a backup, > it's recommended (perhaps critical) that you also maintain a removable OS > which supports the necessary hardware and rpool version, because without it, > you might have no viable restore procedure. Test it. This is SOP, no? -- richard ZFS storage and performance consulting at http://www.RichardElling.com _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
