"Untangling" VDEV, SPARES and Spares After Disk Failure

[CompuLen]

Hi All,

I would be very grateful on your help with the following.

On the system in question I have one pool named storage0.

This pool has one raidz2 vdev, which is/was 5 disks wide and has/had 2 hot spares. I'd like to return it to a state 5 disk raidz2 with 2 hot spares, while hopefully not having to rebuild the pool from scratch.

What preceded the current state was a failed drive and the pool being degraded. After replacing a failed drive and letting the resilvering process finish, I now have a configuration of drives in this pool, which I'm not quite sure what to make of (see screenshots). I mistakenly added couple of extra drives to hot spares, but am now not seeing an option of removing them from the pool.

The confusion is as follows:

• The vdev now seems to be 4 disks wide, but is reported as being 5 wide
• There are two separate sections listing Spares and the other SPARES
• One of the drives sdh appears in both of these sections

 

[CompuLen]

Results of zpool status below:

 

[sretalla]

you should be able to return your spare to the spares list with:

zpool detach storage0 b8068168-36fe-4064-838c-907456325e0

The vdev now seems to be 4 disks wide, but is reported as being 5 wide

No, it's 5 wide, one disk is spared, so you see it as such.

There are two separate sections listing Spares and the other SPARES

Normal when a disk is spared

One of the drives sdh appears in both of these sections

Because it's the spare currently used.

 

[sretalla]

Also...

has/had 2 hot spares

You appear to have 4 spares. That's an unusual number for a pool of only 5 disks in the first place.

You can remove (some or all of) those with zpool remove.

 

[CompuLen]

Also...


You appear to have 4 spares. That's an unusual number for a pool of only 5 disks in the first place.

You can remove (some or all of) those with zpool remove.

Thank you so much @sretalla ! That makes sense. Looks like I am on my way to squaring it all away, once the resilvering completes.

As for the number of spares (4), they are drives I mistakenly added to the pool. They just live in that box for future use. Removing 3 of them from this pool cleaned things up. As I wasn't given an option do it from the GUI and had to use it through cli command you mentioned, it partially led to my confusion. Anyhow, all's good now.

Once more, I appreciate you pointing me in the right direction!