How to mirror the system disk

[blokmech]

Hi there,

I have installed Freenas to use as a storage server for my ESXi server. I have installed freenas on a motherboard attached SATA disk, and have other drives attached on a rocketraid controller. After installing the driver and setup some mirrors and stripes in the controller bios, all is working fine. I now have configured 8 x 1TB as 4 seperate mirrors, 2 x 480GB SSD as stripe and 2 x 30GB as mirror. The 4 mirrors of the 1TB disks are used for 1 zpool. The 480GB ssd's are configured as read cache, and the 30GB as write cache (log). Everything works as expected, and the performance of the vm's is very well.

I would like to configure the system disk with freenas installed also as a mirror. I have already attached a second disk (of the same size/brand/type) to the motherboard, but can't figure out how to create the mirror.

Regards,
Nico

 

[Peter Bowler]

side question,
why do you want to have the system disk mirrored?

are you trying to use it for additional storage or are you worried about availability?

 

[blokmech]

Hi Peter,

It is for availabilty. I have now a redundant zfs-storage server, but what if the system disk is failing?

 

[Peter Bowler]

Gotcha,
Sounds to me like you need that to be hardware Raided, you can't have the OS you boot into, manage the mirror you are booting from (unless I'm REAAAAAALLY missing something).

When you boot the machine you should see the SATA Bios's go by, After the MoBo Bios, But before Freenas boots. Usually alt+F4 for setup etc.

Find out what the manufacturer is on the SATA controller on the MoBo, then look for that splash screen, should be before the RocketRaid splash screen.

 

[cyberjock]

I've seen several people in the forum try to mirror the system disk, and nobody did it successfully. FreeNAS does allow you to do quick recovery in the event that your boot drive fails. As long as you keep a backup of your config file, recovery takes 15 minutes at the most.

Here's what you'd do in the event of a disk failure:

1. Remove the old disk. Insert a new disk.
2. Install FreeNAS to the new disk.
3. Once FreeNAS is installed log into it and choose the option to restore config. The server does a reboot or 2 and poof, all is fixed.

The key is to keep a backup of your config file or you'll be in trouble. I created a cronjob that backs up the config every night automatically. See this thread for how I set it up.

 

[ProtoSD]

This is another topic that has been discussed to death. SEARCH!!