Saturday, January 25, 2014

Dell MD36xxf Storage Array Setup

Today we received a new storage array : a Dell PowerVault MD3600f with two MD1200 expension units. In order to use those new disks, we had a bit of home work todo. Here's how we did it.

But you must be warned : this ain't my best blog post.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

HOWTO : Replace a failed disk drive in a FreeBSD ZFS pool

In this blog post, we will repair a broken ZFS pool from a FreeBSD server. The machine is running FreeBSD 9.2, but so long as your FreeBSD machine runs a ZFS enabled FreeBSD, all the commands in this article should work.

A little background on this machine. It's been in production for about four years now. It was originally installed with four 750 GB disk drives as a raidz2 pool. The OS has been upgraded several times and so is the disk drives (because that's what fails of course, hence this post). This is a ZFS-only machine built by following the ZFS only FreeBSD installation wiki with GPT formated disks.