zfs discuss - Oct 2010 - Slow zfs import solved (beware iDRAC/ILO)

Just a note to pass on in case anyone runs into the same situation.

I have a DELL R510 that is running just fine, up until the day that I needed to
import a pool from a USB hard drive. I plug in the disk, check it with rmformat
and try to import the zpool.  And it sits there for practically forever, not
responding. The machine still responds to network connections etc.,
it''s just the import command that takes forever.

After poking around with truss zpool import, I discovered that there were some
devices that were taking forever to check/enumerate and that they
didn''t correspond to any devices I recognized. Finally I tweaked to the
following:

from cfgadm -lv
Mfg: Avocent  Product: USB Composite Device-0  NConfigs: 1  Config: 0  <no
cfg str descr>

Which is the supplier of the DELL components for the iDRAC management tools.

It turns out that the Virtual Media options were set to "Attach" in
the BIOS so on a zpool import it was trying to read from these devices and
taking between 3-10 minutes to timeout per slice/partition to check.

Setting the Virtual Media to "Detach" and the OS will no longer see
these devices and zpool importing works just fine.

Cheers,

Erik