> From: Cindy Swearingen [mailto:cindy.swearin...@oracle.com] > Sent: Monday, May 03, 2010 12:58 PM > > Hi Ned, > > Yes, I agree that it is a good idea not to update your root pool > version before restoring your existing root pool snapshots. > > If you are using a later Solaris OS to recover your pool and root pool > snapshots, you can alway create the pool with a specific version, like > this: > > # zpool create -o version=19 rpool c1t3d0s0 > > I will add this info to the root pool recovery process. > > Thanks for the feedback...
But if you unfortunately had a necessity to upgrade your rpool version ... Such as I recently did, when my replacement log device was 1Mb smaller than the device it was intended to mirror ... The most graceful way I can think to handle that zpool upgrade would be to also install solaris/opensolaris to a removable disk, and *test* that you can boot from it. This way, when you update your primary OS and then update the zpool ... You can also update the removable OS, and rest assured you've got a bootable removable media which supports the necessary zpool version, so you have actually some option available to restore rpool in the event of failure. But this technique sounds like it leaves a lot of possible failures... Such as ... Once you register your original Solaris 10 OS for updates, are you unable to get updates on the removable OS? Does sparc support booting removable hard disks? And even on the x86, which support booting the removable media, I've certainly seen little "gotchas" such as "Well, it *should* work..." And I recently had a server where I was able to install Solaris 10, but couldn't install opensolaris due to driver incompatibility. So while that's presumably unusual, it's certainly nonzero. So I think the take-away knowledge here is: If you *must* upgrade your rpool version, and you want to be able to restore your rpool from a backup, it's recommended (perhaps critical) that you also maintain a removable OS which supports the necessary hardware and rpool version, because without it, you might have no viable restore procedure. Test it. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
