Hello all,
I have a drive issue in my Nexenta storage array. And I want to increase the amount of storage - I originally did it with 5 1 TB drives, and I wanted to improve resiliency so I can handle a drive failing without an issue. When discussing this with a friend - Michael - he suggested I also add in some cache. So that is what I am going to do.
I have six slots to work with, but one has an SSD (120 GB) that I boot too so I have five slots - each with a 1 TB drive in it. I am going to pull all five out, put three 2 TB drives in, and one 500 GB SSD for the cache.
Lets get started!
- We need a backup of those VMs.
- We need to vacate the array, all VMs need to move off! Storage vMotion or migration works great at this.
- Now we need to remove the NFS share on my array.
- Now we remove our pool. Make sure you are not removing the System pool with is normally rpool.
- Now we remove all the drives. In my case I will leave in the 120 GB SSD that is my OS partition.
- Insert the new drives. I have four 2 TB data drives, one spare 2 TB drive for the resiliency, and one 480 GB SSD for the read cache (which is much bigger than it needs to be).
- We can see SSD 0 which is my boot SSD, and SSD 5 which will be my read cache. One of the 1.8 TiB drives will be my spare, and the other three my data.
- Create our pool, but unlike in the past, where I would use all the drives, I can only select three 2 TB ones.
- Select - using the + sign the first three drives to use for your pool.
- When prompted for the cache select the 480 GB SSD.
- Skip the Log option, as it is a write cache and needs more resources than I have.
- When prompted for spare, select the last 2 TB drive.
- You now use the Create Pool button to create your pool.
- If you were to use the gear icon and select Status, followed by selectibng Disks, you would see something like below. Which is a nice confirmation of what we did.
- Now we need to change from the Pools tab to the Filesystems tab so we can create our NFS share.
- We use the gear icon and select Add New Filesystem.
- In the next screen I only add a name - nfs01 in this case.
- Now we have a share created, and we need to share it out using NFS.
- We will be prompted with the export path - so be sure to write it down. But this is also were you could add some security such as only some hosts could access this share. But in my case I have a dedicated and provide - non - routing - storage network so I do not do anything in this dialog.
So we have less space now, a spare drive, and a read cache. So quite an improvement. Wait, why less space? It turns out out my three 2 TB drives are only providing 3.51 TiB which is a bit low. I expect between 4 and 5 somewhere. But I am asking around about that. Update: it turns out that my 2 TB drives are actually 1.8 TB and between that and the Raid overhead I get only the 3.51 TiB.
I have mounted the export to my two clusters and all is good!
Michael
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