zfs discuss - Jun 2008 - Not automatically importing ZFS pools at boot

Is there any way to set ZFS on a system so that it will not
automatically import all of the ZFS pools it had active when it was last
running?

 The problem with automatic importation is preventing disasters in a
failover situation. Assume that you have a SAN environment with the same
disks visible to system A and system B. If system A loses power (or
otherwise goes down) with ZFS pools live, you ''zpool import
-f'' them on
system B to get them available again, and system A comes back up, system
A will happily import the pools too, despite them being in use on system
B.

(And then there are explosions. Bad explosions. You will probably lose
pools hard, per my previous email.)

	- cks

On Nevada, use the ''cachefile'' property.  On S10 releases, use
''-R /''
when creating/importing the pool.

- Eric

On Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 02:16:03PM -0400, Chris Siebenmann
wrote:
>  Is there any way to set ZFS on a system so that it will not
> automatically import all of the ZFS pools it had active when it was last
> running?
> 
>  The problem with automatic importation is preventing disasters in a
> failover situation. Assume that you have a SAN environment with the same
> disks visible to system A and system B. If system A loses power (or
> otherwise goes down) with ZFS pools live, you ''zpool import
-f'' them on
> system B to get them available again, and system A comes back up, system
> A will happily import the pools too, despite them being in use on system
> B.
> 
> (And then there are explosions. Bad explosions. You will probably lose
> pools hard, per my previous email.)
> 
> 	- cks
> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
--
Eric Schrock, Fishworks                        http://blogs.sun.com/eschrock

On Jun 3, 2008, at 11:16 AM, Chris Siebenmann wrote:
> Is there any way to set ZFS on a system so that it will not
> automatically import all of the ZFS pools it had active when it was  
> last
> running?
>
> The problem with automatic importation is preventing disasters in a
> failover situation. Assume that you have a SAN environment with the  
> same
> disks visible to system A and system B. If system A loses power (or
> otherwise goes down) with ZFS pools live, you ''zpool import
-f'' them
> on
> system B to get them available again, and system A comes back up,  
> system
> A will happily import the pools too, despite them being in use on  
> system
> B.
What you need is in Nevada and is coming to s10u6:
http://blogs.sun.com/erickustarz/en_US/entry/poor_man_s_cluster_end

eric

| On Nevada, use the ''cachefile'' property.  On S10 releases,
use ''-R /''
| when creating/importing the pool.

 The drawback of ''-R /'' appears to be that it requires forcing
the
import after a system reboot *all* the time (unless you explicitly
export the pool during reboot).

	- cks