Migration from Dual head Nexenta, problem with freenas-boot?

[unwired]

On a supermicro dual head storage array that I previously ran Nexenta on, I converted one of the two heads to FreeNAS.. No problem there, everything worked great.

When I converted the second head to FreeNAS, when the second head booted up, instead of going into the new install wizard, it had pulled some of the networking configuration from the first head I updated and had also imported the ZFS pool owned by the first head I had converted.

After shutting down the second head, I tried moving the system dataset on the first head to 'freenas-boot', figuring this would make the second head no longer find this information?

I then performed a new install of the second head, but not instead of booting, it dies into the mountroot> prompt.

All the disks attached to the array are SAS dual ported, so each head can ?unfortunately in this case? see all the other heads volumes.

Thoughts on how to get this to work properly? Perhaps move the boot devices off of hard disks onto USB devices that the other cannot see?

 

[Nick2253]

You might have an issue with this setup. FreeNAS makes some assumptions about the pool, including storing the system dataset and the swap on the pool, and I'm not sure it would work in a dual-head configuration. There should be no problem using ZFS in general, but you may need to customize some of the FreeNAS things in order to make it work.

Paging @dlavigne. You might be a better resource for this.

 

[unwired]

This is the machine in questions: https://www.supermicro.com/newsroom/pressreleases/2010/press100412_SNW.cfm
It only has 1 USB port inside the machine (none externally), so with nexenta I used mirrored SAS drives for the boot. In order to avoid one freenas install finding the other 'freenas-boot' I'm planning on trying inserting a USB drive into the internal USB port on each MB and reinstalling.

 

[unwired]

I should also mention I have two ZFS pools configured on the attached drives.. In theory one per FreeNAS head.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, you'd need to do some hackery. The FreeBSD boot loader will try to load the same thing if it is seeing the same thing. While you might be able to "share" the array, it probably isn't a good idea to attempt it. I'm sure it can be done with some care and some boot hackery. You are probably best off setting up the heads without the disks attached and then moving forward from there.