importing zfs pool into an ixsytem freenas mini xl

[Simon Pierre Desrosiers]

Hello all,

I have a pool running in a mac on 8 drives which are installed in a SanS digital esata enclosure. The enclosure is giving me headaches, frequently putting esata chain offlines. Instead of buying a new enclosure, I was thinking to pop the disk into an ixsystem freenas mini xl and import the pool.

Anyone has any idea if this would work ?

As a second question. I already own an mini xl. I intend to do the test this weekend : export the existing pool, swap the drives, import the pool. If anyone wants to yell at me and prevent me not to do this, for good reasons, now is a good time. Please provide the reason.

 

[Stux]

It should work. You're running FreeNAS on the mac?

 

[danb35]

Even if not running FreeNAS on the Mac (which I'd doubt; I don't think it would boot), OpenZFS on OSX is pretty compatible with OpenZFS on FreeNAS (i.e., FreeBSD). I have a (single-disk) pool that I've been moving between my Mac and my FreeNAS box without issues.

 

[Simon Pierre Desrosiers]

I am happily running openzfs on OSX.

Good, I feel rather confident.

One thing about which I was unsure, the freenas created the following filesystem on the pool :

Code:

tank															3.60T  46.3T   205K  /mnt/tank
tank/.system													13.3M  46.3T   205K  legacy
tank/.system/configs-a7c4a4a3d45a4720a1e6b8ad799731fd		   4.33M  46.3T  4.33M  legacy
tank/.system/cores											  7.92M  46.3T  7.92M  legacy
tank/.system/rrd-a7c4a4a3d45a4720a1e6b8ad799731fd				188K  46.3T   188K  legacy
tank/.system/samba4											  520K  46.3T   520K  legacy
tank/.system/syslog-a7c4a4a3d45a4720a1e6b8ad799731fd			 188K  46.3T   188K  legacy

And I was wondering if that was necessary for the box to run correctly and what would happen if I imported the pool from the mac. Guess I will see friday night.

 

[Stux]

main thing is the system was probably setup with out the freenas style swap partitions etc, and i doubt there would be any feature flag incompatibilities.

 

[danb35]

Yes, FreeNAS uses the .system dataset, as described in the manual. If you're going to remove the pool that it's on, you should probably set it to be elsewhere (like on the boot pool).

 

[Stux]

Yes, FreeNAS uses the .system dataset, as described in the manual. If you're going to remove the pool that it's on, you should probably set it to be elsewhere (like on the boot pool).

Doesn't that happen automagically when you export the pool?

 

[Simon Pierre Desrosiers]

By the way, it worked like a charm. All my pools are there, I just have a few accentuated char problems (for now).