Good morning. I am interested in implementing a remote mirror with ZFS and iSCSI. I''ve gotten the mirroring to work no problem (with a little bit of forcing), but I am concerned about recovery if the mirror fails. If the mirror fails remotely (I.E. the remote node goes down), no problem. I can just recover the remote node by whatever fashion and then re-import the new (or recovered old) iSCSI device into the local zpool. But, if my local node fails, now I suddenly have a remote node with half of a mirror and no zpool information. Since the drive containing the mirror half was never exported, I can''t just import it into a new pool, and I can''t do a "zpool create" with the drive, since that would wipe all contents of the drive while creating the pool. How can I recover the data on this still good half of the mirror? I''m sorry if this is a stupid question, but I''m used to SDS and just mounting the half that is still alive to reach the data, at worst. Ian This message posted from opensolaris.org
As an update, I found out that if I attempt a "zfs import -f -d <dir>", it errors with: "no pools available to import" If I try to force with the pool name itself, it complains that no such pool exists. Ian This message posted from opensolaris.org
Ok, I''ve been actively pouring through this discussion list reading everything I can about ZFS mirroring and remote setups. I have a feeling that on reading everyone''s input, that ZFS is purely designed to have "persistance" or "recovery" mirroring rather than "backup" mirroring. There is no intent on each mirror to be independant, like under SDS, but rather have them dependant, so they can recover each other, in case one of them fails. This makes remote mirroring under ZFS via zpools pretty useless to have a remote backup. I understand now that I have to pursue snapshotting/sending/receiving as an active alternative. Sorry about the confusion. Ian This message posted from opensolaris.org
How have your snapshotting experiments worked out for fault tolerance? One of the things I was hoping was that a solution could be easily constructed similar to what we see from some higher-end IP SAN solutions like LeftHand Networks SAN/iQ and proprietary SANs like Equallogic using just ZFS and iSCSI. Out of curiousity, you wouldn''t be experimenting with this setup and VMware ESX 3.0.1 would you? This message posted from opensolaris.org