So today, I was going to work on setting up a boot server for OpenSolaris and other OS’es I have around here mainly for the convenience of testing.  However, my hardware was conspiring against me and the cooling on the power supply on my OpenSolaris 2008.05 finally quit on me last night.  I had been hoping to put this hardware re-stacking off for a bit while I could work on some other things.

I had the chassis with new power supply and space for more disks, but have not been motivated until now to do the migration.  There’s something about having a potential fire hazard in your house which will create a certain amount of motivation.

My plan is to take the OpenSolaris re-partitioning I previously worked out to create a striped concatenated NAS pool for a fresh OpenSolaris 2008.11 installation.  I’ll then import my existing OpenSolaris 2008.05 rpool as another rpool name, something creative like oldpool and move everything from there onto the new “naspool”.

I’ve been working on this plan since I discovered the rpool cannot be resized, concatenated to, and is restricted to being a simple mirror only.  Hopefully this will change in a future release of OpenSolaris, but it is much more dependent on GRUB being able to read more exotic ZFS filesystem types.

The existing configuration looks like this:

I have a ZFS rpool consisting of two 1TB disks and two 500GB disks which are sitting unused at the moment.  I want to boot off the 500GB disks and add the 1TB disks as concatenated storage.  I could create RAIDZ if I had another 1TB disk and another SATA controller, but I don’t.  However, I will be ready to add another 2TB of disks as a 1TB mirror to the pool later when I have an additional SATA controller.  My hope would be to add an additional 1-2TB fro a total NAS capacity of 2.4-3.4TB.

Additional memory would be nice since this server only has 2GB RAM, it would be nice to take it to 4GB.

Step one is to install OpenSolaris in a small partition on the old Linux LVM disks and then increase the size to 100GB.  I was originally going to use Linux LVM for my NAS until I discovered how wonderful ZFS is.

This will give me enough space for all things related to the base operating system installation.  I plan to run several Solaris Zones on this machine for various services.  The primary reason is to keep each service or related services isolated from the base vanilla operating system installation located in the Global Zone.  If we want to do something out of the ordinary, or even completely ordinary like DNS and NTP, then we’ll do it in a Zone.  Space for the Zone can come out of the NAS pool naspool.

This still leaves me with the old rpool data which must be migrated and will not fit on the 400GB zpool naspool.  So, on to step 2 where I will break apart oldrpool and concatenate one of the 1TB devices to the new naspool.  This will give me a total of 1.4TB of available storage for backups and NAS.

To do this, I will do an import of the old rpool and call it oldrpool.  After that, split off one of the oldrpool disks and attach it to  the 400GB naspool.  From there, I can simply do a zfs export piped to a zfs import to move the files.

The last step will be to take the remaining 1TB disk and the other 400GB partition and make them mirrors of the naspool.  This will then give me 1.4TB of mirrored, expandable storage.