grow zpool on a mirror setup

[Trond Endrestøl]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:30+0200, George Mamalakis wrote:

> 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?

I was under the impression that the above was the original GPT layout 
and partition sizes. Clearly it's not. And yes, you are correct about 
the independency of a partition's position. As for growing a zpool, I 
haven't attempted that at all. I'll give it a try later today.

> > 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!

NP.

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