Managing devices in storage pools

Manipulating and managing devices are common tasks when working with a ZFS storage pool, and more maintenance activities involve adding, deleting, attaching, and detaching disks. According to Oracle, ZFS supports raid0 (stripe), raid1 (mirror), raidz (similar to raid5, with one parity disk), raidz2 (similar to raid6, but uses two parity disks), and raidz3 (three parity disks), and additionally, there could be a combination such as raid 0+1 or raid 1+0.

Getting ready

This recipe is going to use a virtual machine (from VirtualBox or VMware) with 4 GB of memory, a running Oracle Solaris 11 installation, and at least eight 4 GB disks.

How to do it…

According to the previous recipes, the structure of a mirrored pool is pool | vdev | disks, and the next command shouldn't be new to us:

root@solaris11-1:~# zpool create mir_pool2 mirror c8t3d0 c8t4d0
root@solaris11-1:~# zpool status mir_pool2
  pool: mir_pool2
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:

  NAME    ...