SAN/NAS upgrade

All of my important data is stored on my OpenSolaris storage server (an HP ML110 G5). A mirrored pair of 500GB in a ZFS Zpool provided NFS, CIFS and iSCSI sharing. Unfortunately, I ran out of space to the point that ZFS was unable to take snapshots.

I needed to add more storage, but didn't have the drive bays available to do it. So I ordered two 1TB SATA disks with the intention of replacing the two existing disks.

I followed the instructions found at Blog O Matty (a blog I highly recommend). The process was extremely easy:

1. Remove one of the 500GB disks and replace with a 1TB disk.
2. Tell ZFS to "resilver" (aka resync the mirror) the new disk (one command: zpool replace datapool c3d0)
3. Wait a number of hours for the disk to resilver (10 hours when the disks are being used)
   
4. Tell ZFS to clear all error status messages (zpool clear datapool). This puts the pool into an "ONLINE" state for all devices in the pool.
   
5. Remove the second 500GB and replace with the second 1TB disk
6. Tell ZFS to resilver onto the second disk
7. Wait for this second disk to resilver. I did this overnight and it was finished in the morning.
   
8. Tell ZFS to clear the error status on the new disk
9. Check the zpool status (zpool list) and note the new size: Now 928GB
   

The ML110 does not have hot-swap disks, so I needed to power off each time I swapped the disks, but if you have a hot swap capable server, the entire process can be done live with the filesystems mounted. Nice.

With approximately another 500GB free space, I can now experiment with other hypervisors (XenServer and Hyper-V will probably be the first if I can get them working off a USB bootable key drive). I also took the opportunity to add more memory (8GB total) to both the OpenSolaris server and the VM server (the HP ML115). While I was spending money, I also paid out for another 500GB external USB. This means I can now take a backup of the key filesystems (photos, documents etc) and ship them to an off-site facility (aka, my parents house).

Coincidently, T had filled up her C: drive with a huge number of photos and videos. Although the disk is backed up to an external drive, I wanted to move the data to the server. I created a new filesystem in ZFS:

# zfs create datapool/Users/teresa

This filesystem can grow and consume all space in the pool, so I assigned a quota of 30GB:

# zfs set quota=30G datapool/Users/teresa

In order to make this visible to T's Vista PC, I had to share the filesystem over SMB:

# zfs sharesmb=on datapool/Users/teresa

I made sure that T had a Solaris account setup with a password configured so it could authenticate and then mapped the network drive. The UNC path replaces the slashes in the filesystem with underscores: \\opensolaris\datapool_users_teresa

I copied T's documents to the server by changing the locations of the profile shell folders (right-click "Documents", "Pictures", "Videos" etc and select properties, then specify a new location and the contents are moved across - very easy).

It was then I found even more pictures that needed to move across and the 30GB I had allocated to the filesystem was going to be tight in the long term. This was trival to fix:

# zfs set quota=40G datapool/Users/teresa

The change applied instantly and the network drive size increased to 40GB.

It's good to have all our personal data now stored on the ZFS filesystem, with full mirroring, checksumming and backed up.

The now-redundant 500GB disks will be assigned to another blog post...