HDD Upgrade - How to Keep Jails?

[lanky8804]

Sorry if this is a very easy question but have been scratching my head for a while trying to work this one out.

I currently have a Microserver N54L with 2 x 250gb HDD's installed. They are currently form a 500gb Volume which i am playing about with.

I am looking at buying some 3 x 3tb HDD's and install then as a RaidZ1 (one disk redundancy).

My issue is that i would like to transfer my existing jails to my new HDD's. The old 2 x 250gb HDD's will be completely removed from the system.

I have been looking at ZFS Replication but not sure if this does what i want or if there is an easier way?

Your thoughts and comments would be appreciated.

 

[cyberjock]

Currently there is no way to migrate your jail from the old pool to the new pool without significantly hacking FreeNAS' database. It is planned for a future release, but currently this feature is unavailable.

 

[rm-r]

couldnt you just zfs send the dataset? then tell freenas to look there for jails?

 

[Dusan]

I have been looking at ZFS Replication but not sure if this does what i want or if there is an easier way?

Yes, it is possible and you don't even have to hack the config DB. Please see my step by step instruction here: Relocate Jails to SSD helping HDD sleep?

 

[cyberjock]

Whoa! Somehow I didn't see Dusan's post to get it to work before. Good work Dusan. I was thinking about a similar process(albeit mine was more convoluted) but great work!

 

[lanky8804]

Thanks for the answers. The relocating jails article looks interesting.

Just going back to the ZFS Replication. can i set this up to make a copy of my jails which are stored on one of my web servers (temporarily). Remove old HDD's and replace with larger capacity ones then download jails to new config? or does ZFS Replication something completely different?

 

[Dusan]

Thanks for the answers. The relocating jails article looks interesting.

Just going back to the ZFS Replication. can i set this up to make a copy of my jails which are stored on one of my web servers (temporarily). Remove old HDD's and replace with larger capacity ones then download jails to new config? or does ZFS Replication something completely different?

Read my post -- the instructions do use replication (zfs send & zfs receive are the replication commands). The GUI replication functionality is more suited for periodic replication tasks.
Your plugins are currently stored on your web server -- does it use ZFS? The jails functionality is using some ZFS features, if you copy the jails to another filesystem and back to ZFS they may not work properly (or at least the jails will consume much more disk space). Again, read my post I linked above for explanation.