Upgrading from one Microserver to another, want to check to make sure it's ok?

[wywywywy]

Hi all,

I've got 9.10.2 on a USB stick with four drives in my HP Microserver Gen7 N40L.

I would like to move the install to another Microserver (Gen7 N54L). They have the same amount of memory (16GB ECC).

So I think, I just need to move the USB drive and the four disks across, with absolutely no re-configuration necessary. Is this right?

I just want to check with you guys before I dig myself a hole.

Thanks.

 

[m0nkey_]

So I think, I just need to move the USB drive and the four disks across, with absolutely no re-configuration necessary. Is this right?

This is mostly correct. The only thing you will need to do is reconfigure the NIC.

 

[gpsguy]

In the OP's case, unless they added an auxiliary NIC, they probably won't have to do that. Both use a Broadcom NIC. And, since they both use the same disk caddies, moving the drives will be easy.

I too, have a N40L and a N54L.

This is mostly correct. The only thing you will need to do is reconfigure the NIC.

 

[wywywywy]

Oh yea that's a good point actually, because they will have different MAC addresses, will FreeNAS think that it's a new NIC, and lose all the network settings? (static IPs etc)

And if it does lose the network settings, what would happen to the network settings in the jails?

 

[adrianwi]

I did exactly this a few years ago, and was surprised to find that after simply moving the drives and USB stick everything just worked. I was using a static IP address on the N40L and this is what the N54L used.

The drive trays are the same, so the whole thing too about 15 minutes, including shutting down and rebooting :)

Don't expect much of a performance increase though!

 

[danb35]

because they will have different MAC addresses, will FreeNAS think that it's a new NIC

No, FreeNAS doesn't care about the MAC address, but it does care about the interface name, which depends on the driver used. If one machine were using a Realtek NIC (spit), its first interface would be re0. If you then moved to a box using an Intel NIC, its first interface would be em0. FreeNAS would still be trying to configure re0, which wouldn't work. You'd simply need to reconfigure the network interface, if you'd manually configured anything in FreeNAS anyway. But if both boxes are using the same NIC hardware, they'll be using the same drivers, and therefore will have the same device names. Shouldn't be anything to do.

Now, if you assigned your FreeNAS box an IP address by using a DHCP reservation in your router, that would depend on the MAC address, so you'd need to update that.

 

[wywywywy]

Lovely great thanks!

Looks like I can finally sell the N40L soon :)