Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2010 21:24:19 -0500 (EST) From: Charles Sprickman <spork@bway.net> To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Subject: "sharing" hot spares? Message-ID: <alpine.OSX.2.00.1012072110160.43483@hotlap.local>
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All, This is probably an odd question... We're extensively using ZFS on a bunch of 1U boxes and packing all the drive bays full. This is all SATA, so I would like to have hot spares available, but without migrating everything to new enclosures, I'm not seeing an easy way to deal with this. Is there anything out there that would allow me to export a few drives from another box as block devices that the other boxes could *temporarily* use as hot spares until someone onsite could physically do a drive swap? I would also really like to share one drive amongst multiple hosts - I am making the likely over-optimistic assumption that I'll be dealing with no more than one drive failure per say, 3 hosts at a time. -hast doesn't seem quite right, as it's more about clustering than just exporting a device. -geom-gate looks like it might fill the bill, but I'm unsure as to whether it would allow an export of one drive to more than one box, and if it did, if it would have any way of letting a second host know the drive is busy. -iscsi seems like it might work as well, but I'm leery of anything not deemed stable/supported enough to be in the base system. Anything else? I'm also totally clueless as to how zfs would deal with having one drive coming over the network while the others are local. I assume it should work. Also if there was a reboot while it was running with a disk from this network spare "pool", could zfs then find the network drive it was using since it will be available later than the local drives? This whole scheme is just something that came to me a few minutes ago, my apologies if it sounds a bit nuts. Just trying to solve an interesting problem. Thanks, Charles
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