Matty wrote:
We use VxVM quite a bit at my place of employment, and are extremely interested in moving to ZFS to reduce complexity and costs. One useful feature that is in VxVM that doesn't seem to be in ZFS is the ability to migrate vdevs between pools.
Could you be more specific? Are you moving disks between disk groups? Or, are you moving disk groups between machines? I suspect that there is a terminology barrier here which could send us down a rathole...
This is extremely useful when you want to synchronize a set of temporary disks with a set of master disks, and migrate the temporary disks to an alternate server once the synchronization completes (we use this to perform host free backups). Are there any plans to introduce a similar capability in ZFS? I read through the zpool manual page and the ZFS documentation on opensolaris.org, but was unable to find a specific set of options to accomplish this. If I missed something, please let me know. I will glady wander off to read.
zfs send/receive is likely what you want. The main difference between copying mirrors (ala VxVM) and zfs send/receive is that in the VxVM case you copy all of the disk blocks, whereas in ZFS you only copy the data. My first impression is that you want a zpool which can move between systems (similar to a VxVM disk group), and would use zfs send/receive to "copy" the data between zpools (locally or remotely, as an option). I don't see any advantage, but a few disadvantages, to copy by silvering mirrors. -- richard _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
