ZFS hot spares

Steve Polyack korvus at comcast.net
Mon Mar 8 18:06:11 UTC 2010


ZFS in FreeBSD lacks at least one major feature from the Solaris 
version: hot spares.   There is a PR open at 
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=134491, but there hasn't been 
any motion/thoughts posted on it since its creation almost one year ago.

I'm aware that on Solaris, hot spare replacement is handled by a few 
Solaris-specific daemons, zfs-retire and zfs-diagnose, which both plug 
into the Solaris FMA (Fault Management Architecture).  Have there been 
any thoughts on porting these over or getting something similar running 
within FreeBSD?  With all of the recent SATA/SAS CAM hotplug work now 
committed, it would be nice to have automatic replacement of hot spares 
with a future hot-replacement of the failed drive.

On the other side, I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has had 
success in rolling their own scripted solution: i.e. something which 
polls 'zpool status' looking for failed drives and performing hot-spare 
replacements automatically.

Thanks,
Steve Polyack



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