Creating and Destroying a ZFS Snapshot You can use the zfs snapshot command to create a snapshot, which takes as its only argument the name of the snapshot that you want to create. In the example below, you are creating a snapshot of datapool/home/user that is named friday. # zfs snapshot datapool/home/user@friday Note: To create […]
ZFS
Solaris ZFS : How to Designate Hot Spares in a Storage Pool
What is a hot spare and how does it work? The ZFS hot spares feature enables you to identify disks that can be used to replace a failed or faulted device in one or more storage pools. Designating a device as a hot spare means that the device is not an active device in a […]
Solaris ZFS : How to Offline / Online / Detach / Replace device in a storage pool
Taking Devices Offline in a Storage Pool When hardware is unreliable or not functioning properly, ZFS continues to read or write data to the device, assuming that the condition is only temporary. If the condition is not temporary, you can instruct ZFS to ignore the device by taking it offline. You can take a device […]
Solaris ZFS : How to Create and Manage Mirrored Storage Pools
Creating a Mirrored Storage Pool To create a mirrored storage pool, you use the zpool create command followed by the pool name, the mirror keyword, and the storage devices that will compose the mirror. Multiple mirrors can be specified by repeating the mirror keyword on the command line. # zpool create datapool c1t0d0 c2t0d0 mirror […]
How To Increase rpool Size On Solaris 11 (Requires a Reboot)
With Solaris 11, Oracle introduces the new zpool split command to split the ZFS pool (SPARC / x86 ). This comes in handy to increase the size of the rpool. Below are the high level steps involved : Steps Involved attach a mirror device to the rpool reboot off the mirror (to verify everything works). […]
How To Delete Files on a ZFS Filesystem that is 100% Full
When a ZFS file system has no space left then the deletion of files can fail with “disk quota exceeded“. The post provides different ways to create free space to overcome the situation. 1. Truncating files If the files can not be removed directly, we can first truncate them and then delete them. # cat […]
How to check zpool status in Solaris
The post describes few basic commands to check the health of a ZFS pool. 1. Basic Storage Pool Health Status The simplest way to request a quick overview of pool health status by zpool status -x command. Example: # zpool status -x all pools are healthy You can list the pool state for a specific […]
How to find zpool version and filesystem version in Solaris
Upgrading the ZFS filesystem and zpool versions is a one-way operation. Once upgraded, the versions cannot be downgraded. This will prevent booting from older boot environments if support for the upgraded zpool/filesystem version is not available within those boot environments. Thus it is important to chcek the zpool version before the upgrade. The current zpool […]
Solaris ZFS : How to import 2 pools that have the same names
It is possible that you may have to manage 2 pools that have the same name. For example, if you have a pool name “datapool” and you have another from some other storage array called “datapool”. You may wish to import this second pool (with the same name) to your system. ZFS will not allow […]
How to install a ZFS boot block in solaris
The post discusses about how to install ZFS boot block on a system running a ZFS root filesystem. This is normally required when a system fails to boot from a disk containing a root filesystem. A typical error may include: The file just loaded does not appear to be executable Bootblk: can’t find the boot […]