Curious question about using zfs send -R and receive on FreeBSD

[dweimer]

I recently migrated a machine that was built on a VM to physical 
hardware using the zfs send -R option against a snapshot of its root zfs 
setup.  I went from smaller drives to larger, both using a mirrored 
zpool.  However the devices were different, the device IDs on the VM 
were da0 and da1, the device IDs on the physical hardware were ada0 and 
ada1.  I had used labels when creating the gpt layout to plan for this.  
And all worked great, in fact it was the fastest I have ever converted a 
virtual machine to a physical machine.
After I finished  though, I got curious, was it actually necessary for 
me to mount the new boot zfs partition while running on the live cd and 
copy the zpool.cache file I had created when creating the zpool or would 
have the existing cache file that would have been included in the zfs 
send contained the right information?  As the zpool was pointed at the 
gpt label devices, or was the fact that the size changed enough 
difference that copying the file was indeed necessary?

-- 
Thanks,
    Dean E. Weimer
    http://www.dweimer.net/