Introducing a new box & new drives

[Cody]

I am currently using a HP N54L in production for backup/file server purposes. It's configured for Raidz1 with 5 x WD Red 3TB drives and 16GB RAM.

I have just purchased another N54L to act as a ZFS replication target for offsite replication with the same specs, aside from the drives which are 5 x WD RE4 3TB enterprise drives.

I'm wanting to swap out the Red drives for the enterprise drives in our existing onsite box for increased reliability but am unsure as how best to do so while limiting downtime. This way the Red drives will be used offsite for D/R and the enterprise drives will be onsite and more suited to the production workload.

The options I have thought of so far are:

1. Swap out the drives one-by-one and let it rebuild onto each new drive. How long will this take and is it reliable?
2. Build the new box with the enterprise drives and replicate the existing box to it and then swap the boxes around. Will this affect current shares or introduce connectivity issues?

Any advise would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

 

[cyberjock]

RAID5 is dead... http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162

1. Very possible. It is time consuming. It depends on how many disks you have and how much data you have. Replacing 1 disk at a time typically takes about the same amount of time as as scrub. I've done it and it works. You just have to be patient with it. I did one disk a day right after work and in 10 days I had all of the drives replaced.
2. You can totally do this to. As an option you could duplicate your existing config onto the new server, then create a new zpool with the exact same name. Then your shares in your config file would "just work" once the data is copied to the new server. You just have to change the mapped shares on workstations to the new IPs and stuff.

 

[Cody]

Thanks Cyberjock.

I understand Raid 5 has pretty much been exiled from the community (everything else we have is running Raid 10) however with the combination of enterprise drives+offsite backups+allure of higher capacity, I'm willing to risk it...That is until I meet a failure which will then probably change my mind.

Anyway option 2 sounds a lot more straightforward so I will probably go with that.

If I copy over the configuration, will it not copy the NIC settings as well? Meaning if I want the new box to inherit the IP for a seamless transition, it will already have it through the config?

Also, I'm estimating I'll be doing this right around the time when 9.1 release comes out (My current box is 8.3.1 Beta3). Would you suggest installing 8.3.1 on the new box and then updating to 9.1 when everything is transferred, or update to 9.1 prior to transferring?

Thanks again.

 

[cyberjock]

The network config will carry over to the new box if your network settings are all manually setup. You obviously will have to change one of the boxes during the actual data migration. Having 2 systems with the same IP is... bad. But I think you know that.

You can't upgrade to 9.1 the same as the 8.x releases. This is due to the image size increasing from 2GB to 3.7GB. What you have to do when "upgrading" to 9.1 is install 9.1 to a new stick(or erase the old one), then import your config file from 8.x. You can't do a GUI upgrade from 8.x to 9.x.

 

[Cody]

OK, so I think I'm just going to start from scratch with the new box.

In light of your concerns Re: Raidz-1, I'm going to be putting 6x3TB enterprise drives configured for Raidz-2 into the new box, with 16GB RAM, I'm hoping this will cope.

As for the FreeNAS version I think I'll load up a fresh 9.1-RC1 install and play around with that until Release comes out. Once that happens I'll rsync my datasets over 1 by 1 from my current production box and then swap the boxes over.

How does that sound? any suggestions or potential issues you could forsee?

Thanks.

 

[cyberjock]

That sounds like a very good plan!

If your motherboard can handle 32GB of RAM I'd get 2x8GB sticks for now. That way if you need more later you can just buy 2 more 8GB sticks.

If you are using ZFS on both machines you can use ZFS replication. From my lessons learned in migration ZFS replication can max out a 1Gb link and rsync was about 1/3 of that. Rsync is CPU heavy and single threaded, so its pretty common to see it bottleneck your data transfers.