Upgrade HW and iSCSI

[Penbrock]

I have an old workstation I had setup FreeNAS on a year ago. It has 2 mirrored 2T drives and feeds iSCSI to a Xenserver to a few vHosts.

Now I need to move it to a real server. I have FreeNAS 11 installed with 2 -4T drives to take over.

What is the easiest and safest way to move the data and iSCSI setup to the new hardware and drives?

 

[Nick2253]

You can make a backup of your config, restore it to the new server, and then just move the drives to the new server. You may need to change your network configuration if the NIC names changed (often because of different manufacturers).

Then, to upgrade to 4TB drives, you can replace the 2TB drives one at a time. When both have been replaced, FreeNAS should auto-expand your vdev (and therefore pool) to 4TB.

 

[toadman]

What Nick2253 says will definitely work and may be the easiest for the initial data transfer. With some work afterward to resilver the pool to the 4TB disks.

Alternatively you could snapshot the pool on the existing server and zfs send the snapshot to the new freenas and share out via iscsi like before. You would have to configure the iscsi target on the new server like on the old one (and potentially match the IP address(es)), or change the config on the clients. Or move the two disks to the new server, import the pool, and zfs send internally on the new server. Many ways to accomplish it.

 

[Penbrock]

Wow thanks, it sounds like this is not going to be as bad as I thought. Will this work;
1) Backup old server
2) Add 4t to old server and add to mirror.
3) Remove 4T drive from mirror when it is done and install in new server.
4) Load backup in to new server. add 2nd 4T to mirror
5) Make needed IP changes once old server is off line.

How does one issue the auto-expand on the new drives?

 

[Nick2253]

http://doc.freenas.org/11/storage.html?highlight=expand#replacing-drives-to-grow-a-zfs-pool

 

[toadman]

If replacing disks with larger disks, but not otherwise changing the pool physical structure, when all disks are of the larger size the pool should expand on it's own. There is a zpool setting called "autoexpand" that controls this process. It's default ON I believe. You can check how it's set with zpool get autoexpand tank. If it's off, set it to on with zpool set autoexpand=on tank.