Boot raid-z from USB stick?
Added by Floris Bos 7 months ago
My understanding is that it is not possible to have raid-z as root filesystem, because the GRUB bootloader does not support it.
Is there any way to get around the requirement of having to dedicate a seperate drive for the system? e.g. would it be possible to put the Opensolaris boot archive stuff on an USB stick, and boot using that?
Replies
RE: Boot raid-z from USB stick? - Added by Christian o 7 months ago
Yes it is generally possible - I had issues with read speed with my setup though.
I ended up using OCZ e-SATA / USB stick as a boot drive. Works perfect and takes less than 1.3GB on the USB stick (I have moved as much as possible like swap and log files over to my 4disk RAID-Z pool.
On my previous nexenta setup I partitioned my 4 drives so I could have a boot pool which was mirrored on 2 small partitions and 2 unused partitions in the beginning of the disks and a 4 partition RAID-Z pool on the rest of the disks. This worked well also but it took me a few hours to figure out how to do the installation (which i don't remember - but NCP1 supported a manual install step which made it possible).
RE: Boot raid-z from USB stick? - Added by Floris Bos 7 months ago
Thanks for the reply.
I played around a bit. It seems grub does support lzjb compression, so by typing "zpool set compression=on syspool" in the console during installation, I managed to reduce the disk space used to 620 MB.
Ideally I would also like to move /usr from the USB stick to the raid-z pool. But so far I do not have any luck with that.
If I simply add an entry to /etc/vfstab for /usr and move the files, I get an "WARNING: pool 'tank' could not be loaded as it was last accessed by another system (host: nex hostid: 0x2a008)" error on boot. Even though it tank was created on the same system.