Best Practices when Moving Pool to Another Machine?

[theprez]

Hey All -

So I currently have 8 4TB WD Reds on an older i3 desktop class CPU and plan to move the drives over to entirely different hardware (supermicro board, ECC ram, LSI 8 SATA, etc) and am curious what the best process is. I assume it is:

1) Shutdown the machine properly
2) Move the physical drives from one machine to the other
3) Install a fresh copy of FreeNAS to USB on the new machine
4) Import the Pool?

One thing of note, the new machine will be running VMware ESXI and this instance of FreeNAS will be virtualized. The LSI controller will be passed thru to the FreeNAS instance so there's no middleware between the two. Is this also a best practice?

Thanks!

 

[Samuel Tai]

It's probably safer to leave the current pool as-is, and replicate the contents to a new pool on the new virtual server.

 

[Spearfoot]

Hey All -

So I currently have 8 4TB WD Reds on an older i3 desktop class CPU and plan to move the drives over to entirely different hardware (supermicro board, ECC ram, LSI 8 SATA, etc) and am curious what the best process is. I assume it is:

1) Shutdown the machine properly
2) Move the physical drives from one machine to the other
3) Install a fresh copy of FreeNAS to USB on the new machine
4) Import the Pool?

One thing of note, the new machine will be running VMware ESXI and this instance of FreeNAS will be virtualized. The LSI controller will be passed thru to the FreeNAS instance so there's no middleware between the two. Is this also a best practice?

Thanks!

You are on the right track...

But first -- do you have a good backup of this pool? Because something can always go wrong...

I believe you will want to export the pool on your older machine before shutting it down. Then import it on the new one after moving the disks over.

Yes, best practice for virtualized instances of FreeNAS is to pass the HBA through to the FreeNAS VM. Also, reserve all of the FreeNAS VM memory as well. How you do this depends on what version of ESXi you're using. Versions 6.5 & 6.7 have a 'Reservation' sub-page under the VM's Memory settings, which includes a 'Reserve all guest memory (All locked)' checkbox: you definitely want to check this box for your FreeNAS VM.