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Replacing an EACS drive for an EADS

// February 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

So the shop somehow managed to deliver my custom PC with 2x EADS drives and 1x EACS drive. Normally, to rectify this kind of mishap would require backing up the data on the drive and restoring the data to the replacement disk.

Not so with ZFS. Because my three drives are in a raidz storage pool, ZFS automatically partitions and manages my data. This allows up to one device in the pool to fail (single parity).

Replacing the drive was a case of:

1. Pulling out the old disk.
2. Cabling up the new disk in the, now-empty slot.
3. Booting the OS as normal.
4. Resilvering the raidz zpool with a single command: zpool replace <name of device to replace>
5. Go get coffee, rebuilding the array will take some time. Once it’s done, check status with: zpool status

After the break I give some examples of what you may see:

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ZFS to the rescue

// February 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

ZFS saved my data!

root@opensolaris:~# zpool status -x
pool: tank
state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error.  An
attempt was made to correct the error.  Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
using ‘zpool clear’ or replace the device with ‘zpool replace’.
see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
scrub: scrub completed after 0h44m with 0 errors on Thu Feb 12 13:27:23 2009
config:

errors: No known data errors
root@opensolaris:~#

I wonder if this is a symptom of poor PSU performance? I’ll be monitoring that disk c6d0 (SATA3).

Seamless upgrades with OpenSolaris & ZFS

// February 7th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

One other benefit of using ZFS and it’s ability to take snapshots of an entire filesystems … is that I can upgrade my boot environment inside a clone of my existing system. If I have problems, I can always roll back with a single command line.

Those days of maintaining a 2nd set of hardware for testing operating system patches may be numbered!

[see: OpenSolaris getting started guide, and OpenSolaris Boot Environments docs] (more…)

Somewhere … a Windows file server just cried a little inside

// February 7th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

This is a screen shot of my OpenSolaris install. I created an approx. 2,000 GB storage pool out of 3x 1TB hard disk drives. You’d think it should add up to 3,000 GB of storage … but one of the disks is being used to provide redundancy to the pool. My data is being spread out over 3x disks, so now, if one of the disks fails, I can easily replace it with any disk of similar capacity and OpenSolaris will automatically recover my data for me.

The real cool part? After copying all my data across to the new storage pool, I took a backup of the data using a single command, zfs snapshot -r tank/share@20090205

This is all made possible by the Zetabyte File System (ZFS) feature in OpenSolaris, an open source project from Sun Microsystems.

Somewhere there’s a sysadmin slaving over some tape backups or wrestling with logical volume management, manually copying old data over to new disks. ZFS takes manageability of disk resources to a whole new level of simplicity. Adding more space to the pool is simply a matter of unboxing the new drives, connecting them and adding them to the pool. The pool automatically grows larger to accommodate the new disks and data is magically spread over the new enalrged pool.

ZFS – Finally back on OpenSolaris

// February 1st, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

Havoc! Let me summarise my long list of problems with my custom PC. The spec is roughly:

• ASUS P5KPL-AM Motherboard, with Intel Core2Duo processor
• 3x Western Digital 1TB hard drives, WD10EADS (SATA)
• 1x Western Digital WD160GB, SATAIII HDD,
• DVD burner and USB card reader mounted internally
• 400 W PSU, 2x additional case fans

A little summary of my troubles after the break:

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FreeBSD with ZFS

// January 30th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Technology

So I got FreeBSD 7.1 w/ ZFS on my root file system working like a charm.

I followed the instructions at www.ish.com.au, with some exceptions, which follow after the break.

The cool thing? 1,860 GB of storage space. 930 GB of disk space is being used for automatic ZFS backups (the checksums) to protect my data. Total = 2,790 GB.

Total spent = around B$1,250.

This is 67 cents per gigabyte of better than RAID-5 protected storage. With a CPU thrown in to boot! haha.

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OpenSolaris vs FreeBSD .. .which do I go for?

// January 30th, 2009 // 4 Comments » // Technology

Dilemma! I’m setting up a home NAS … but do I return to my FreeBSD roots or shall I try something new and go with OpenSolaris?

Both are Open Source, both have excellent communities etc. And most importantly? Both have ZFS.

Well, my Dad always told me to be systematic! A clear mind = a clear purpose. So a small comparison follows after the break …

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OpenSolaris with a raid-z array, Part2

// January 27th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

Here is my attempt to install OpenSolaris on 3x 4GB drives in a virtualised environment. This did not go well at all! My virtualised environment could not boot because I used the wrong commands in Step 3 and overwrote the wrong partition information. I’ve left this here for my own personal records.

Part of the problem is that OpenSolaris does not really support using sub-partitions within a hard disk, and I was trying to do with creating a raid-z array without a fourth disk for my zfs rpool.

In the end because I was targeting the wrong slices, my OpenSolaris ended up unbootable.

DO NOT FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS UNLESS YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!

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OpenSolaris with a raid-z array, Part1

// January 26th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

The documentation for ZFS and OpenSolaris seems “technically correct” in a kind of austere fashion … but I haven’t found some “dumbed-down” simplified documentation for OpenSolaris newbies like there are for Linux/FreeBSD equivalents. Reading the Solaris/OpenSolaris docs, I get this aura that  Solaris/OpenSolaris is engineered in a real professional manner, and it just “seems to work” the way you expect it to after digesting the technical documents. So maybe that is why there’s not as much “newbie friendly” docs.

ZFS is exciting because it is a whole new way of administrating storage. I can have 3x 1 terrabyte disk drives set up in a redundant fashion, giving me 2 TB’s of storage space and using 1 disk for redundancy. ZFS is an enterprise-grade technology that does all kinds of data checking while making it much easier to manage my storage devices. And the really coot part? When it comes to upgrading to bigger disks, I just swap the disks in one by one and let ZFS’s self-healing techniques expand the array.

Check out Sun’s own materials: “ZFS – the last word in file systems“.

And by the way … OpenSolaris is a kind of a “Beta” for Solaris 11. It seems that Solaris 11 will be based on the OpenSolaris code, so heads up, if you want to get ahead of the curve with Solaris technology, you may want to get skills with OpenSolaris now

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