9.10 Fibre Channel Hot-Plug/Hot-Mounting

[IceBoosteR]

Hello Folks,

I have some new stuff ordered.
Right now I have a Storage-only server with an E3-1225v3, 24GB ECC Ram and so on.
On the other side I have my playmachine, Dual Xeon, 36GB of ECC RAM and that my ESXi or later XEN host. On this host I have a NetApp diskshelf with 14 drives - which I have formatted to 512k and those are working fine, and yes, they are connected via FirbeChannel.
FreeNAS 9.10 is also capable of FC, I have seen some postings. But my question is little bit different here.
I have my storage server running 24/7 and I want to plug in the self via FC. But this puppy is consuming a lot of power (250 watts in idle...) and I only wanrt to use this thin at the weekends. So can I attach and detach the pool on the DiskShelf (will be RAIDZ3), shut down the DiskShelf, and power the puppy later ony and then import the pool?
Is this something FreeNAS is capable of? So "hot mounting" the disks? Or is a restart everytime necessary?
Do I have some risks by doing that? Data loss on the other pools or so? I think not, but if anyone knows anything about the topic, I would really be happy to get an answer.

I dont want to "just try it". That also did not worked with Corral xD

 

[joeschmuck]

I dont want to "just try it". That also did not worked with Corral xD

Unfortunately I think that is what you will need to do. Someone would need to try it to see if it works.

But of course you have a backup of the data before attempting this.

 

[mav@]

FC initiator in FreeNAS should handle hot-plug good enough. But ZFS does not like disks disappearing massively. Your scenario may work if you explicitly export the pool before detaching disks and re-import it after reattaching.

 

[IceBoosteR]

Hello guys,
thank you for catching this up.
I will try this on my ESXi host with a fresh FreeNAS installtion. I do not have any data on it. I'll share my results then.

IceBoosteR

 

[IceBoosteR]

I am back - and in my backpack I have some great news.
Everything is working as I would like it to work.
Here are my steps:
First enabling PCI passthrough with the QLogic QLE2462 and boot up the FreeNAS VM.
Then I power up the Netapp Array, the disk come online and FreeNAS see them:

After this I checked the disk configuration and I see all 14 disks online:

I also checked SMART with smartctl and it also worked like a charme:

The next step was creating the pool. My choose goes to RAIDZ3 in one vdev and also this went fine.

After that I detached the pool. I got some waring but as the documentation said, this is fine.
Next step was importing the pool. Also worked.
Now we got the delicate part. Detaching the pool. Then I detached the FC-cable. FreeNAS now shows me, that the disks goes offline:

Also this is okey for me.
Reattaching the cable and FreeNAS shows me some warnings:

And then I could import the pool again:

Tadaaa

So I think this should be fine when going to do this on my production system later.
As I said, this pool is maybe only for playing around and some backups. When detaching the pool, FreeNAS automatically stores the shares and flushes all blocks to the pool. So no deta loss here.

Any one as some more ideas or suggestion for a different approach?

Would be awesome to hear that!

IceBoosteR