grow zpool on a mirror setup

[George Mamalakis]

Trond,

thank you for your reply. Now to my questions:

On 03/15/12 14:45, Trond Endrestøl wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:00+0200, George Mamalakis wrote:
>
>> "I am experimenting with one installation of FreeBSD-9-STABLE/amd64 on a
>> VirtualBox that is using gptzfsboot on a raid-1 (mirrored) zfs pool. My
>> problem is that I need to grow the filesystem size of zfs partitions. I
>> followed this guide
>> <http://support.freenas.org/ticket/342>(http://support.freenas.org/ticket/342),
>> which is for FreeNAS, and encountered a few problems.
>>
>> # gpart show
>> =>       34  40959933  ada0  GPT  (19G)
>>          34       128     1  freebsd-boot  (64k)
>>         162  35651584     2  freebsd-zfs  (17G)
>>    35651746   5308221     3  freebsd-swap  (2.5G)
>>
>> =>       34  40959933  ada1  GPT  (19G)
>>          34       128     1  freebsd-boot  (64k)
>>         162  35651584     2  freebsd-zfs  (17G)
>>    35651746   5308221     3  freebsd-swap  (2.5G)
> There's one mistake I'd point out. Your ZFS partitions are followed by
> your swap partitions. It would be a lot easier if the ZFS partitions
> were the last one on each drive.
Why is this a mistake? Shouldn't ZFS grow up to the size of its 
underlying partition, regardless of its position? Is this restriction 
documented somewhere?
> Since your are using VirtualBox, I would simply create a new pair of
> virtual drives with the desired sizes and attach these to your VM.
> Next, create new boot, swap, and ZFS partitions, in this particular
> order, on the new drives. Create a ZFS pool using the new ZFS
> partitions on the new drives, and transfer the old system from the old
> drives to the new drives, using a recursive snapshot and the zfs
> send/receive commands. Remember to set the bootfs property on the
> newly created ZFS pool prior to reboot.
>
I understand that there are quite a few alternatives on how I could 
migrate my system to one with larger disks, but I hoped that the method 
that was supposed to work with zpool and gpart, would have worked indeed 
(It was the simple, and required less space than the one that you propose).

Thanks again for your answer!

-- 
George Mamalakis

IT and Security Officer
Electrical and Computer Engineer (Aristotle Un. of Thessaloniki),
MSc (Imperial College of London)

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Faculty of Engineering
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

phone number : +30 (2310) 994379