Resize ZFS partition to grow ZFS Volume

[gvecchi]

Hi everyone.

I installed FreeNAS 8.0.4 on VMware ESX 3.5 , after that I created a second SCSI virtual disk (da1) and connected it to create a new ZFS volume.
Now, I want to increase the space for da1 and I've enlarged the VMware disk (da1) with several GBs, so:

1) how to resize zfs partition? I need do it "offline" with a kind of livecd ?
2) how to grow zfs volume to fit new partition?

Thanks a lot!

 

[budmannxx]

I don't think you can grow volumes this way, at least not with the current version of ZFS in FreeNAS. You can either add new vdevs to your pool, or replace your drives one at a time with bigger drives (making sure to resilver after each drive replacement).

 

[gvecchi]

I don't think you can grow volumes this way, at least not with the current version of ZFS in FreeNAS. You can either add new vdevs to your pool, or replace your drives one at a time with bigger drives (making sure to resilver after each drive replacement).

I prefer let only 1 disk for data, so I need to add a bigger disk and next remove the old one, that's right?
I don't know what "resilver" mean... how to resilver?

Thanks budmannxx

 

[budmannxx]

Almost all of the benefits of using ZFS come from using multiple hard drives; ZFS gives you redundancy like RAID along with other benefits. If you're only going to use one disk for data in FreeNAS, I think you should be using UFS instead of ZFS. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

I don't know what "resilver" mean... how to resilver?

Resilvering is the process that takes place when a failed drive in a ZFS pool is replaced. It writes the necessary data to the new drive.

 

[gvecchi]

I need ZFS because of dedupe feature in next FreeNAS release.
Resilvering is an automatic process or I need to do it throught web interface?

 

[peterh]

if you think you need dedupe - then you have problems. It will cost lots of memory and it will affect
read/write speed.

 

[gvecchi]

if you think you need dedupe - then you have problems. It will cost lots of memory and it will affect
read/write speed.

I need dedupe because in my Company users are stupid: they copy the same files several time into different folders of the same Windows share. To prevent unnecessary used space, dedupe is the only way at the moment.
If dedupe will cost lots of memory, I will increase memory, isnt' it?

 

[peterh]

Dedupe created a hashtable over all blocks with the same checksum. Not onlly will this grow fast but it will
also create a significat write delay as each write has to seek this list.

It's simply not scalable.

Get more disk, and start using quotas ( and education) on the users.

 

[gvecchi]

I need a filesystem that can grow if I resize the disk size. As budmannxx said "the benefits of using ZFS come from using multiple hard drives" and I add "physical hard drives": maybe ZFS is not the right choise for a Virtual NAS like the one I want to set up.

Thanks to everybody for the support!