Best Way to Move Drives to Another Location

[sonoracomm]

Hi,

I hope this is not a dumb question...

I have a situation where I would like to move a pool of 4 drives from a (small, lower quality) JBOD into the main (larger, higher quality) server chassis. This pool is only used for storing virtual disks accessed by a very simple NFS scheme...no users or SMB, just a few (nested) ZFS filesystems and a couple of NFS shares limited by IP address.

I don't want to rename the pool or do anything other than physically move the drives.

I think the drives will be connected to a different, but identical LSI HBA in the same server.

What would be the simplest, fastest way to physically move these drives? (I know I could brute-force it if necessary and I have done so in the past.)

I have Napp-IT Pro Datamover available, if that would help.

Thanks in advance,

G

 

[pricklypunter]

I would imagine the easiest way is to run zpool export on the old box, then run zpool import on the new one after you move the disks over. I would still caution you though to take a back-up first. Things can and do go wrong and with a little disaster planning ahead of time, might just save you a sore head later

 

[gea]

- Export the pool
- Move disks (if backplane is not hotplug, shut down server and move in power off state)
- Import pool

Completely uncritical.
Problems can occur only if destination system is older (unsupported ZFS version/features) or source is FreeNAS (due swap partitions on disks). Type of disk controller is uncritical. If an import failes due one of the above reasons, you can re-import on the old system and copy files over (replication, rsync, robocopy via a Windows desktop, datamover etc). Only replication (preferred method) or robocopy via network or datamover locally can care about acl, rsync does not.

 

[gea]

Moving drives between Jones and servers can be tricky.

No,
export pool, move disks, import pool. No problem, no headache.
Tricky can be SMB permissions (mainly with SAMBA but not with the OmniOS/Solaris kernelbased SMB server that uses Windows SID with Active Directory or local users (with same Unix uid) to keep permissions intact.