Solved How to move my server to a new box

[fred974]

Hello,

I have a FreeBSD 10 running on ZFS filesystem. Is it possible to copy the entire server and its configuration files and redeploy it to a new server? If yes, could I have some pointers please?

Thank you
Fred

 

[phoenix]

Read the zfs(8) man page. Specifically, the sections on send and recv. Those commands, piped through an SSH tunnel, or via sysutils/bbcp, will allow you to transfer all the data in the pool to a remote pool.

 

[fred974]

Doest it matter if the current server had a RAID10 setup with a RAID controller? Will this break the system b one transferred? [ What? --Mod. ]

 

[gkontos]

Here is a very old guide which should be able to give you some hints.

 

[phoenix]

Doest it matter if the current server had a RAID10 setup with a RAID controller? Will this break the system b one transferred? [ What? --Mod. ]

Your original post mentions ZFS on the current server, and that you want to transfer the setup to a new server. That implies ZFS on the new server as well.

Where does a hardware RAID controller come into things?

 

[kpa]

Doest it matter if the current server had a RAID10 setup with a RAID controller? Will this break the system b one transferred? [ What? --Mod. ]

You really don't want to put ZFS on top of any kind of hardware or "pseudo" software RAID. ZFS is designed to operate on raw disks without any additional layers in between.

 

[fred974]

OK... I have a Dell PowerEdge R610 with 4 SAS disks in it. Before installing FreeBSD, I set the Dell PERC controller to do RAID 10... Is that a wrong setup and does it matter when moving my setup to the new server?

 

[Terri_Kennedy]

OK... I have a Dell PowerEdge R610 with 4 SAS disks in it. Before installing FreeBSD, I set the Dell PERC controller to do RAID 10... Is that a wrong setup and does it matter when moving my setup to the new server?

Those controllers are reasonably powerful (particularly the latest model, the H7xx/H8xx ones). If you're going to use ZFS, I'd suggest creating individual volumes of one drive each on the PERC controller, then using ZFS to combine them into a zpool.

However, if you don't need the features ZFS offers and the disks are reasonably low-capacity, you could just build a RAID 5 set on the PERC. I do that on my R710/H700 systems with 6 x 146GB 15K SAS drives, for example.

You can monitor drive health with sysutils/smartmontools. You will need to # kldload mfip to create the passthru devices that smartd monitors.

Remember that neither RAID nor ZFS is backup, and have a backup system in place to protect your data.