ZFS install on a partition

[Paul Kraus]

On May 23, 2013, at 4:53 AM, Albert Shih <Albert.Shih at obspm.fr> wrote:

> Have you ever try to update a ZFS Pool on 9.0 to 9.1 ? 

I recently upgraded my home server from 9.0 to 9.1, actually, I did exported my data zpool (raidZ2), did a clean installation of 9.1, then imported my data zpool. Everything went perfectly. zpool upgrade did NOT indicate that there was a newer version of zpool so I did not even have to upgrade the on-disk zpool format (currently 28).

> I've a server with a big zpool in 9.0 I'm wonder if it's good idea to
> upgrade to 9.1. If I lost the data I'm  close to dead person. If I thinking
> to upgrade to 9.1 it's because I got small issue about NFSD, LACP.

My data zpool is not that big, only five 1TB drives in a raidZ2 for a net capacity of about 3TB, plus one 1TB hot spare.

My suggestion is to do the following (which is how I did the "upgrade"):

1) on a different physical system install 9.1, get the OS configured how you want it
2) on the production server, export the data zpool
3) shutdown the production server
4) remove the OS drives from the production server and replace with the drives you just installed 9.1 on
5) booth the production server with the 9.1 OS drives, make sure everything is working the way you want
6) import the data zpool

If the import fails, you can always put the 9.0 drives back in and get back up and running fairly quickly.

My system has the OS on a mirror zpool of two drives for just the OS.

--
Paul Kraus
Deputy Technical Director, LoneStarCon 3
Sound Coordinator, Schenectady Light Opera Company