Moving disks to a new server with Proxmox installed directly on ZFS

[hefferbub]

I am about to replace one physical server with another, while moving the hard disks to the new one. There are 4 2TB HDs configured in a mirrored/striped (2+2) configuration.

The current server is running Proxmox 4.1-4, and when I installed it, I used ZFS to format all the drives into a single zpool, so both the data and Debian/Proxmox are stored on the pool.

Question: What do I need to do to have the disks successfully boot and operate in the new server? Can I just move them physically, being careful to place them in the same order?

Or is something more complex required? I see some general info about using "zpool export" before moving and "zpool import" after, but I assume that would only work if I could do it while booted from the Proxmox installer disc.

Any advice?

Thanks

 

[fireon]

Question: What do I need to do to have the disks successfully boot and operate in the new server? Can I just move them physically, being careful to place them in the same order?

Put the HDDs in the new server, power on, ready The only one thing that is to configure the network, because new macadresses.
What says:

partx -s /dev/XXX #for example /dev/sda

Another way is to use PVE-Zsync.

 

[hefferbub]

That sounds like good news!

What says:

partx -s /dev/XXX #for example /dev/sda

Here is the partx output for all 4 disks:

partx -s /dev/sda
NR      START        END    SECTORS  SIZE NAME UUID
1         34       2047       2014 1007K      5ed375f6-979e-410e-ac4a-d4f059a56454
2       2048 3907012749 3907010702  1.8T zfs  bf013519-606b-443d-95b5-5d0dc9537db4
9 3907012750 3907029134      16385    8M      550747e5-b7a9-4135-bc7f-8fb4f11cd7a8
root@superserver:~# partx -s /dev/sdb
NR      START        END    SECTORS  SIZE NAME UUID
1         34       2047       2014 1007K      3d200b18-bdc9-42ba-9ac4-9722bbb1510a
2       2048 3907012749 3907010702  1.8T zfs  f0f51def-96f1-42e8-990a-fd67f1be5057
9 3907012750 3907029134      16385    8M      15fd6ba0-e970-4028-9cc3-154ff6dd7ce7
root@superserver:~# partx -s /dev/sdc
NR      START        END    SECTORS SIZE NAME UUID
1       2048 3907012607 3907010560 1.8T zfs  02944de7-627d-a64d-94a8-9b5630d9ca11
9 3907012608 3907028991      16384   8M      34e3f4a8-a5e9-0845-87db-c923801e316d
root@superserver:~# partx -s /dev/sdd
NR      START        END    SECTORS SIZE NAME UUID
1       2048 3907012607 3907010560 1.8T zfs  aef4d31b-0d07-0b4b-9b58-d447f739d529
9 3907012608 3907028991      16384   8M      cf9aa9ec-af9a-7349-9a53-5d5d247317db

 

[fireon]

OK, no UEFI, so put it in another host and it will working fine.

 

[hefferbub]

I finally did the server switchover, and it all worked beautifully. ZFS rocks!

The one minor glitch was that the system at first failed to bring up any of the network interfaces. The ports would not even light up.

It turned out, I needed to delete the contents of this file: /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules which seems to retain info about the network devices, which was no longer correct for the new server. Clearing the contents and rebooting did the trick.

By the way, I'm becoming a big fan of used servers. By watching on Ebay for used Supermicro servers, I was able to put together beefy 2U/8 bay rackmount server with dual Xeon 6 core/12 thread CPUs, 96 GB of ECC memory, 4TB of ZFS RAID 10 (4 disks mirrored + striped) with a datacenter ssd (Intel DC 3500 - 300G) partitioned for SLOG and L2ARC, and a hot spare HD for about $1000.

 

[fireon]

It turned out, I needed to delete the contents of this file: /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules which seems to retain info about the network devices, which was no longer correct for the new server. Clearing the contents and rebooting did the trick.

Yes thats normal.

And ebay: buy it!!!