Migrating ZFS to 9.0

B

bsus

Hi,

There are only some days/weeks until 9.0 will get released. I wanted to make a complete reinstall of our fileserver. We're running a zfs raidz1 with five drives. My question is now:

Can I just install FreeBSD new over an USB medium or will the zfs data get lost?

Regards
 
ZFS pools are almost completely self contained, there is one external file /boot/zfs/zpool.cache but it's not needed unless you have root on zfs setup. You can safely upgrade the OS or reinstall it from scratch without any danger of losing the pool data.
 
You can safely upgrade the OS or reinstall it from scratch without any danger of losing the pool data.
Click to expand...

Like said above, but make sure you have a backup!! Just in case....
Maybe you select the wrong drive, and install the OS on one of the disks belonging to the vdev of the pool.


regards
Johan Hendriks
 
Ok thank you Good to know ;)

Is it recommand to use ZFS as default filesystem?
For root even theres only one drive?


Regards
 
I wouldn't recommend ZFS on root on a server myself, disaster recovery is a little bit too tricky compared to lets say UFS root fs on gmirror(8). For a desktop it may be useful to have everything on ZFS but I find ZFS little bit of an overkill for desktop machines. YMMV :)
 
I think it is better to have the / on a separate disk from your file storage, in such case you can either:
(a) install a new hard drive to keep only the system and mount the storage
(b) change the filesystem of / (using UFS with gmirror/gstripe is a good advice)

Please also note that you can export and import the zfs filesystem, so this is a good way to have a backup before installing (if you have enough space of course).
 
I didn't had good experience with gmirror...always resilvering somehow..

The system is already seperated from the data at the moment I use one drive with ufs with all system data and 4 drives in a raidz1 as home-storage.
Just if there will be another server it should be better to have a raid1 for the system to have a better reliable.


Please also note that you can export and import the zfs filesystem
Click to expand...
What do you mean exactly?
 
bsus said:
What do you mean exactly?
Click to expand...

Zfs has a couple of commands called export and import that are used to "move" a storage from a system to another (or behind the same system).
This can be useful when migrating a set of disk to another machine or to sync a system with another live system. Here you can find some documentation.
 
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