-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Sorry if this list is inappropriate. Pointers welcomed.
Using Solaris 10 Update 10, x86-64. I have been a ZFS heavy user since available, and I love the system. My servers are usually "small" (two disks) and usually hosted in a datacenter, so I usually create a ZPOOL used both for system and data. That is, the entire system contains an unique two-disk zpool. This have worked nice so far. But my new servers have SSD too. Using them for L2ARC is easy enough, but I can not use them as ZIL because no separate ZIL device can be used in root zpools. Ugh, that hurts!. So I am thinking about splitting my full two-disk zpool in two zpools, one for system and other for data. Both using both disks for mirroring. So I would have two slices per disk. I have the system in production in a datacenter I can not access, but I have remote KVM access. Servers are in production, I can't reinstall but I could be allowed to have small (minutes) downtimes for a while. My plan is this: 1. Do a scrub to be sure the data is OK in both disks. 2. Break the mirror. The A disk will keep working, B disk is idle. 3. Partition B disk with two slices instead of current full disk slice. 4. Create a "system" zpool in B. 5. Snapshot "zpool/ROOT" in A and "zfs send it" to "system" in B. Repeat several times until we have a recent enough copy. This stream will contain the OS and the zones root datasets. I have zones. 6. Change GRUB to boot from "system" instead of "zpool". Cross fingers and reboot. Do I have to touch the "bootfs" property? Now ideally I would be able to have "system" as the zpool root. The zones would be mounted from the old datasets. 7. If everything is OK, I would "zfs send" the data from the old zpool to the new one. After doing a few times to get a recent copy, I would stop the zones and do a final copy, to be sure I have all data, no changes in progress. 8. I would change the zone manifest to mount the data in the new zpool. 9. I would restart the zones and be sure everything seems ok. 10. I would restart the computer to be sure everything works. So fair, it this doesn't work, I could go back to the old situation simply changing the GRUB boot to the old zpool. 11. If everything works, I would destroy the original "zpool" in A, partition the disk and recreate the mirroring, with B as the source. 12. Reboot to be sure everything is OK. So, my questions: a) Is this workflow reasonable and would work?. Is the procedure documented anywhere?. Suggestions?. Pitfalls? b) *MUST* SWAP and DUMP ZVOLs reside in the root zpool or can they live in a "nonsystem" zpool? (always plugged and available). I would like to have a quite small(let say 30GB, I use Live Upgrade and quite a fez zones) "system" zpool, but my swap is huge (32 GB and yes, I use it) and I would rather prefer to have SWAP and DUMP in the data zpool, if possible & supported. c) Currently Solaris decides to activate write caching in the SATA disks, nice. What would happen if I still use the complete disks BUT with two slices instead of one?. Would it still have write cache enabled?. And yes, I have checked that the cache flush works as expected, because I can "only" do around one hundred "write+sync" per second. Advices?. - -- Jesus Cea Avion _/_/ _/_/_/ _/_/_/ j...@jcea.es - http://www.jcea.es/ _/_/ _/_/ _/_/ _/_/ _/_/ jabber / xmpp:j...@jabber.org _/_/ _/_/ _/_/_/_/_/ . _/_/ _/_/ _/_/ _/_/ _/_/ "Things are not so easy" _/_/ _/_/ _/_/ _/_/ _/_/ _/_/ "My name is Dump, Core Dump" _/_/_/ _/_/_/ _/_/ _/_/ "El amor es poner tu felicidad en la felicidad de otro" - Leibniz -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQCVAwUBTwaHW5lgi5GaxT1NAQLe/AP9EIK0tckVBhqzrTHWbNzT2TPUGYc7ZYjS pZYX1EXkJNxVOmmXrWApmoVFGtYbwWeaSQODqE9XY5rUZurEbYrXOmejF2olvBPL zyGFMnZTcmWLTrlwH5vaXeEJOSBZBqzwMWPR/uv2Z/a9JWO2nbidcV1OAzVdT2zU kfboJpbxONQ= =6i+A -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
