RFC: Suggesting ZFS "best practices" in FreeBSD

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2013-Jan-22 09:26:39 -0600, Mark Felder <feld at feld.me> wrote:
>On Tue, 22 Jan 2013 09:04:42 -0600, Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com>  
>wrote:
>
>> I'm a proponent of using various types of labels, but my impression  
>> after a recent experience was that ZFS metadata was enough to identify  
>> the drives even if they were moved around.  That is, ZFS bare metadata  
>> on a drive with no other partitioning or labels.
>>  Is that incorrect?
>
>If you have an enclosure with 48 drives can you be confident which drive  
>is failing using only the ZFS metadata?

There are two different issues here.  ZFS stores metadata on each disk
which it uses to determine the pool layout and where that disk fits
into that layout.  The device pathname is solely used as a hint and
ZFS doesn't care how you juggle the disks.

OTOH, the sysadmin needs some way of identifying a physical disk based
on the logical identifiers that the system provides.  This is totally
up to the sysadmin and there's no reason why you couldn't write ZFS
disklabel numbers on your physical disks in addition to or instead of
writing "daX" or the gpart label onto the disk.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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