larger disk for a zfs pool

[andrew clarke]

On Mon 2011-08-01 09:37:55 UTC-0500, Dan Nelson (dnelson at allantgroup.com) wrote:

> In the last episode (Aug 01), Dick Hoogendijk said:
>
> > OK, my freebsd system runs on ZFS boot. W/ solaris getting larger disks 
> > for a pool was quit easy. Simply replace one disk from a mirror for a 
> > larger one, wait for the resilvering and after this replace the second 
> > one for a larger disk and wait for the resilvering again. That's it. 
> > Been there, done that. But my feeling tells me it is not that simple for 
> > a FreeBSD zfs root system, or is it?
> 
> Should be the same procedure.  Make sure you either use "zpool online -e"
> when swapping in the new disks, or that you have the zpool autoexpand=on
> attribute set.

On my FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE machine, "-e" is an "invalid option" and
"autoexpand" an "invalid property".  I suspect these are features of
ZFS v28 and are not provided with the ZFS v15 provided with FreeBSD
8.2-REL.

Judging from behaviour I experienced experimenting with ZFS in a
virtual machine using 8.2-REL, it was possible to replace all drives
in a ZFS mirror with larger ones and increase the size of the pool,
but (after resilvering) it required either a reboot, or (if I recall
correctly):

  zpool export tank
  zpool import tank

for the increased size to become available.  So I assume "autoexpand"
was implied for ZFS v15.

However this was not with FreeBSD booting from 'tank'.  Trying to run
"zpool export tank" may result in a "Device busy" error if the boot
device was the "tank" pool.

It might be worthwhile experimenting in on a spare (or virtual)
machine to get a definitive answer, especially since there seem to be
differences depending on FreeBSD version.

Regards
Andrew