Hi, here's a quick summary of the answers I've seen so far:
- Splitting mirrors is a current practice with traditional volume management. The goal is to quickly and effortlessly create a clone of a storage volume/pool. - Splitting mirrors with ZFS can be done, but it has to be done the hard way by resilvering, then unplugging the disk, then trying to import it somewhere else. zpool detach would render the detached disk unimportable. - Another, cleaner way of splitting a mirror would be to export the pool, then disconnect one drive, then re-import again. After that, the disconnected drive needs to be zpool detach'ed from the mother, while the clone can then be imported and its missing mirrors detached as well. But this involves unmounting the pool so it can't be done without downtime. - The supported alternative would be zfs snapshot, then zfs send/receive, but this introduces the complexity of snapshot management which makes it less simple, thus less appealing to the clone-addicted admin. - There's an RFE for supporting splitting mirrors: 5097228 http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=5097228 IMHO, we should investigate if something like zpool clone would be useful. It could be implemented as a script that recursively snapshots the source pool, then zfs send/receives it to the destination pool, then copies all properties, but the actual reason why people do mirror splitting in the first place is because of its simplicity. A zpool clone or a zpool send/receive command would be even simpler and less error-prone than the tradition of splitting mirrors, plus it could be implemented more efficiently and more reliably than a script, thus bringing real additional value to administrators. Maybe zpool clone or zpool send/receive would be the better way of implementing 5097228 in the first place? Best regards, Constantin -- Constantin Gonzalez Sun Microsystems GmbH, Germany Platform Technology Group, Global Systems Engineering http://www.sun.de/ Tel.: +49 89/4 60 08-25 91 http://blogs.sun.com/constantin/ Sitz d. Ges.: Sun Microsystems GmbH, Sonnenallee 1, 85551 Kirchheim-Heimstetten Amtsgericht Muenchen: HRB 161028 Geschaeftsfuehrer: Marcel Schneider, Wolfgang Engels, Dr. Roland Boemer Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrates: Martin Haering _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
