[geeks] Impressive...

[velociraptor]

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 3:04 PM, velociraptor <velociraptor at gmail.com> wrote:

> I need to educate myself more, obviously.  I didn't realize you could
> not grow the pools transparently.  My original plan was to take two
> new disks and stripe them, move the data to those, then use the
> existing 3 disks to start the zpool, transfer the data to zfs, then
> put the two new disks into the zpool and grow it.  This will have to
> be revised, and I'm going to need to reconsider the disks I use for
> the project.

Looking at my data, I think I can still work this with the planned
hard drives, though the data transfer may be a bit hairy since I'll be
using a non-redundant zfs pool for the temporary storage.  I'll
basically be doing what this fellow does, only I don't  have a zpool
yet; my data will be coming off of my hw raid 5 on the 3ware card:

http://breden.org.uk/2008/09/01/home-fileserver-raidz-expansion/

There's a lot of good info on this fellow's blog.  It's cool to see
home enthusiasts tackling zfs.

One question I do have--and I'll search some more after I get some
solid sleep (fscking on-call pager did that just the right interval to
not really sleep thing this evening :-( ):  If I create a zpool over
the top of a hw raid array, will zfs see the space when that raid
device gets bigger?

I know it's not any more "space efficient" than mirroring two raidz
zpools (if that is even possible).  I see a couple of mentions of
using raid controllers in jbod mode, and given what zfs does it's
obvious why you'd do that.  I'm just wondering about zfs over things
like LUNs, which I don't see much talk about other than some
operational "here's how you add a LUN to a zpool" kind of thing.
Pointers to more "enterprise-y" info appreciated.

I can see why NetApp put the lawyers on them, though if there are no
ex-NetApp folks there, I'm guessing that won't go far.

=Nadine=