I have a fairly old esxi home lab based on intel s5520HC and 2x L5640s
the setup serves my purposes and upgrading the hardware is not in the cards at the moment..
I am on 6.0xx still as initial testing when 6.5 came out that power optimization was not as good and my 24x7 server that mostly sees light load was using more wall power at idle.. I dont know if its improved or not with 6.7 or latest updates.. 7.0 is a non starter based on hardware compat issues
I have this server in AIO configuration with Napp-it home use and omnios-r151022-f9693432c2
one issue is that a pool that I had been using for many years, had moved into this setup as a 2 device pool, and using RDM.. that I later added a device to, also using RDM... it was working fine and reported that it was using the whole disk..
strangely when I changed the configuration from RDM to passing the whole SATA controller to Napp-it.. the 3rd drive that was added shows it using a partition and not the whole disk like the other 2.. very strange.. and pool performance is taking a hit..
this pool is 3 x 8TB and it at 70%ish filled... I have a backup using send/receive on a per dataset level to a shelf that has 3 x 5 wide raidz1 devs
FIRST QUESTION (finally right)
to correct the pool, I am deciding between the option of doing a replace operation using a new 8TB drive and let is silver or to destroy the pool create and restore it from scratch...
the drawback to the first is that resilver takes a long time and is rather thrashy
the drawback to destroy rebuild is that I would be down to just one copy of roughly 18TB of info... albeit with redundancy but more than a single drive failure in either of the 3 raidz luns would result in loss...
the replace operation seems pretty straight forward but if I go the destroy and use send/rcv route.. what napp-it sequence is best .. do the send one dataset at a time? do the entire pool? and can I, after the restore, go back to using the backup pool with the existing jobs without having to rebuild the backup.. ?
SECOND QUESTION
having to stay at ESXI 6 .. should I just keep using omni 22 or update to 36? the upgrade path would require updating omni multiple times as a straight upgrade from 22 to 36 is not supported... so building a new VM I would have to install 36 from scratch and then install napp-it and reconfigure from scratch since the pre-build VM is for later ESXI versions ?
recommendations here ?
the setup serves my purposes and upgrading the hardware is not in the cards at the moment..
I am on 6.0xx still as initial testing when 6.5 came out that power optimization was not as good and my 24x7 server that mostly sees light load was using more wall power at idle.. I dont know if its improved or not with 6.7 or latest updates.. 7.0 is a non starter based on hardware compat issues
I have this server in AIO configuration with Napp-it home use and omnios-r151022-f9693432c2
one issue is that a pool that I had been using for many years, had moved into this setup as a 2 device pool, and using RDM.. that I later added a device to, also using RDM... it was working fine and reported that it was using the whole disk..
strangely when I changed the configuration from RDM to passing the whole SATA controller to Napp-it.. the 3rd drive that was added shows it using a partition and not the whole disk like the other 2.. very strange.. and pool performance is taking a hit..
this pool is 3 x 8TB and it at 70%ish filled... I have a backup using send/receive on a per dataset level to a shelf that has 3 x 5 wide raidz1 devs
FIRST QUESTION (finally right)
to correct the pool, I am deciding between the option of doing a replace operation using a new 8TB drive and let is silver or to destroy the pool create and restore it from scratch...
the drawback to the first is that resilver takes a long time and is rather thrashy
the drawback to destroy rebuild is that I would be down to just one copy of roughly 18TB of info... albeit with redundancy but more than a single drive failure in either of the 3 raidz luns would result in loss...
the replace operation seems pretty straight forward but if I go the destroy and use send/rcv route.. what napp-it sequence is best .. do the send one dataset at a time? do the entire pool? and can I, after the restore, go back to using the backup pool with the existing jobs without having to rebuild the backup.. ?
SECOND QUESTION
having to stay at ESXI 6 .. should I just keep using omni 22 or update to 36? the upgrade path would require updating omni multiple times as a straight upgrade from 22 to 36 is not supported... so building a new VM I would have to install 36 from scratch and then install napp-it and reconfigure from scratch since the pre-build VM is for later ESXI versions ?
recommendations here ?