Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2013 19:30:25 -0800 From: Freddie Cash <fjwcash@gmail.com> To: Graham Allan <allan@physics.umn.edu> Cc: FreeBSD Filesystems <freebsd-fs@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: benefit of GEOM labels for ZFS, was Hard drive device names... serial numbers Message-ID: <CAOjFWZ5DH2wb8m2eTX-d1bxdfGLOCpDB06%2BRKqA7kL5Lyvawkg@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <512FE773.3060903@physics.umn.edu> References: <512FE773.3060903@physics.umn.edu>
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You label the drive with something that tells you: - enclosure - column - row IOW, something that definitively tells you where the drive is located, without having to pull the drive to find it. To do so, you have to install 1 drive at a time, and label it at that point. For example, we use the following pattern: encX-A-# Where X tells you which enclosure it's in, A tells you which column it's in (letters start at A increasing to the right), and # tells you the disk in the column, numbered top-down. Whether you label the entire drive using glabel or just a GPT partition is up to you. We use GPT labels. On 2013-02-28 3:49 PM, "Graham Allan" <allan@physics.umn.edu> wrote: > Sorry to come in late on this thread but I've been struggling with > thinking about the same issue, from a different perspective. > > Several months ago we created our first "large" ZFS storage system, using > 42 drives plus a few SSDs in one of the oft-used Supermicro 45-drive > chassis. It has been working really nicely but has led to some puzzling > over the best way to do some things when we build more. > > We made our pool using geom drive labels. Ever since, I've been wondering > if this really gives any advantage - at least for this type of system. If > you need to replace a drive, you don't really know which enclosure slot any > given da device is, and so our answer has been to dig around using > sg3_utils commands wrapped in a bit of perl, to try and correlate the da > device to the slot via the drive serial number. > > At this point, having a geom label just seems like an extra bit of > indirection to increase my confusion :-) Although setting the geom label to > the drive serial number might be a serious improvement... > > We're about to add a couple more of these shelves to the system, giving a > total of 135 drives (although each shelf would be a separate pool), and > given that they will be standard consumer grade drives, some frequency of > replacement is a given. > > Does anyone have any good tips on how to manage a large number of drives > in a zfs pool like this? > > Thanks, > > Graham > -- > ------------------------------**------------------------------** > ------------- > Graham Allan > School of Physics and Astronomy - University of Minnesota > ------------------------------**------------------------------** > ------------- > ______________________________**_________________ > freebsd-fs@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/**mailman/listinfo/freebsd-fs<http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-fs>; > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-fs-unsubscribe@**freebsd.org<freebsd-fs-unsubscribe@freebsd.org> > " >
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