I have my new HPE bl460c gen8 blade systems now in my existing virtual hypervisor XCP-Ng pool with my Dell Poweredge R710’s systems temporarily while I assess them. I need to keep them running see how they handle the loads, how those loads affect my UPS power systems, the network throughput, plus storage connectivity. I migrated some VM’s between them tonight and that went well though one spiked and kicked the blade server fans to full blast which caused one of my UPS’ to go into alert as it was maxed out for a while.
I was waiting for my backup FreeNAS system to be ready as well as getting my storage pools extended on my primary FreeNAS before joining the blade servers into the XCP-ng pool, but that was derailed waiting for one more drive. I also had a port on one of my 10gbe NIC’s not working and had to grab one from another server to test. The vendor sent me a replacement relatively fast as well which has tested well.
I was initially going to extend my new FreeNAS storage pool by adding individual drives to the vdev but I read that wrong that this feature is available now, it isn’t. Extending ZFS vdev’s with individual drives in FreeNAS is a future feature in FreeBSD not something I can do now.
Now since I have a vdev of 3 drives in raidz I could destroy that and create a 5 drive vdev and pool then replicate data from my backup FreeNAS with my 5 current 16 TB SAS drives that I imported my original drive pool on or order one more 16 TB drive and create a new vdev and extend the storage pool that way on my primary FreeNAS. Currently this is how you extend a pool in FreeNAS with ZFS, you need a vdev of equal number of drives and capacity. I chose to get one more drive to extend the 3 drive vdev with a new 3 drive vdev. I didn’t feel like replicating data from backup to primary since I would be making changes and testing this my 10gbe network I’m still solidifying in my blade chassis an my new Mikrotik switches.
Overall everything is looking solid and ready to move forward so I can start spinning up new VM’s and containers to start some serious cloud and devop work along with getting deeper into programming with the multiple environments I will be able to bring up at will.
