Move data to new hardware and disks

[Kurt Peterson]

Hi all,

I would like to move my freenas installation from one server to another. Complete with new hardware and disks controllers etc.

Knowing that it would be possible to move the disks to another chassis and restart and let the ZFS do its magic, but I want to install on new larger disks.

Can someone point me in the right direction? What would I need to copy over (rsync etc) so that the new server would look and act like the older server?

Thanks in advance,

Kurt

 

[Chris Moore]

I have done this a couple of times. The fastest way is if you can temporarily connect all the disks to the same system.
Is that something you might be willing to consider?

How fast it would be done depends on how much data you are copying and what type of pool layout you have. I did a system at work with 330TB of data that took 16 days to copy, but I have done my system at home where it was finished in six hours.

Would you be willing to share build description of both the new and old systems?

 

[Kurt Peterson]

HI Chris,

Old system is a IBM 3550 sever with 4 900Gb disks for data. The OS and cache disks are SSD's
New system is a HP Microserver with 4 4TB disks for data. OS and cache disks are also SSD's

As you can imagine the new server is much quieter and uses less power.

 

[Kurt Peterson]

The data to be copies is mostly small office files. There are a few SMB shares and one large NFS share for proxmox hosts.

 

[Chris Moore]

As you can imagine the new server is much quieter and uses less power.

Yes, but it doesn't give you any room to add the four old disks to the server and copy direct. You are forced to copy over the network.
Here is a thread where they discuss using zfs send | zfs receive to copy data between servers:
https://forums.freenas.org/threads/replication-stream-compression.73563/#post-509985
That is probably your fastest method, since you are stuck with needing to go over the network.