ZFS moving drives around

Question

At some point I'm going to build an OpenSolaris based NAS. I was wondering that if I make a 4 drive RaidZ1 pool and at some point need to move the pool to another OpenSolaris server do is there anything I need to worry about? Is as simple as unplugging the drives and then just plugging them in another server and running zpool import -f pool?

Answer 1

That's it, assuming you exported the pool. If not, you'll need to force and export than import as normal.

Answer 2

Some things you need to worry about are:

• The architecture. Pools created on x86 wont be importable by SPARC and reciprocally unless you are using whole disks (EFI labels) as vdevs instead of slices.

• The OpenSolaris release. If the destination server is using an older release of OpenSolaris, it will likely be impossible to successfuly import the pool and/or have the file systems mounted.

• The pool name. If a different pool having the same name is known by the destination host, you'll need to import it by its id and rename it if the other one is still imported.

Finally, instead of forcefully importing the pool, better to properly export it from the source machine if doable:

zpool export pool

Then importing will simply be done like this:

zpool import pool