Motherboard Replacement

[Rickinfl]

Hi,

I have a FreeNAS server running with 12 drives. I'd like to upgrade the motherboard. The drives are connected to 2 - 9211-8i controllers. I was wondering if I would lose the data or the ZFS partitions.

Thanks

 

[Nick2253]

The ZFS data is entirely contained to the disks themselves. Which is one of the huge benefits of ZFS over other kinds of RAID solutions. And all your FreeNAS settings, like shares, etc, should be entirely contained within your config. Make sure you make a config backup, in case something goes wrong with your boot device when switching everything around.

However, if you have some weird, non-supported config (like you're running ZFS on top of RAID), then you might have issues. Since you provide virtually no details of your setup or what you're planning on doing, it's impossible for us to offer specific guidance.

 

[jgreco]

No.

You can take it from Intel->AMD->Intel. You can take drives, assuming they're SATA, off the 9211 and put them on mainboard ports, assuming the ports are good SATA ports. You can upsize the host, you can go to a dual socket affair, go up, down, left, right, it should work, assuming the replacement hardware is "FreeNAS compatible" and you don't introduce any odd issues like trying to put SAS drives on a SATA controller. If you go from a board with one kind of network controller to another kind, expect to need to reconfigure it, because the underlying device name changes ("em0" -> "igb0" for example), but the data will still be there and this is just some console reconfiguration.

Make damn sure you hook up and test all your drives to make sure they are there, and make sure that anything else you do in the interim does not write any data to the drives. Do not drop, bang, bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate the drives while moving them. So there are things you *could* do that could break it, but they're probably at least one of dumb, or deliberate, or tragic.

You also have the option to export the pool (DO NOT MARK THE DISKS AS NEW DISKS!) and re-import it on the new hardware, but this means more reconfiguration.

 

[Rickinfl]

I will be moving the LSI 9211-8i cards to the new board. All I'm changing is the motherboard, CPU, RAM. No other changes.
If the 9211 cards in RAID with that be an issue? Or should they just plug into the new board and run?

 

[jgreco]

You shouldn't have them in RAID mode.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/confused-about-that-lsi-card-join-the-crowd.11901/

If you do, it won't be a problem to move them as long as you hook them up the same exact way, but the problem with RAID mode is that it obscures the status of the drive and also uses a less-reliable device driver for the disk I/O. Remediating that sort of issue can be tricky depending on specifically what has happened.

 

[bigdawk77]

I can confirm that I just did this very thing due to a motherboard/PSU problem, without any issues (no raid card though...), I went from an intel i3 cpu/mobo to an amd athlon/fm2 mobo without any issues. Backed up all my settings, and all I did was plug in my double-USB drives containing the FreeNAS OS, and everything worked without any configuration. I have 4 drives with double drive redundancy, and running a few plug-ins.

 

[jgreco]

I can confirm that I just did this very thing due to a motherboard/PSU problem, without any issues (no raid card though...), I went from an intel i3 cpu/mobo to an amd athlon/fm2 mobo without any issues. Backed up all my settings, and all I did was plug in my double-USB drives containing the FreeNAS OS, and everything worked without any configuration. I have 4 drives with double drive redundancy, and running a few plug-ins.

That's impressive, usually AMD and Intel boards have different ethernet chipsets so I would have expected a modest tweak to be needed for that. Always nice to hear of success stories with hypothetical situations, though, thanks for the confirmation.