More storage space for Openmediavault server
I’ve been running a NAS based on OpenMediaVault with a storage pool based on the ZFS file system for some time now.
Introduction
This NAS has previously served only as a backup, as I use a 4 TB NVMe SSD in an external enclosure for my photos. However, space was becoming limited, so I decided to replace the six 4 TB hard drives with larger ones.
In the article OpenMediaVault and ZFS, I already described how to set up OpenMediaVault with a ZFS file system. However, I wanted to try out how to migrate one data pool to another using zfs send zsf receive in a virtual environment.
Preparation
I dared to buy hard drives again, this time not from Amazon, but from Jacobs and Future-X, because they had 16 TB Exos hard drives on offer. However, I have to give both sellers a big thumbs-up for how well the goods were packaged.
I’ve always had an add-on card that provides additional SATA ports via PCI. So I was able to leave the six 4 TB drives in the enclosure for now and connect the three new drives as well.
Original Pool
The original pool for photo and video files still had 17 TB free, but I would have had to move it anyway because the external NVMe SSD was running full.
Migration
So I created a pool with a total of 29 TB on the new disks, which I could then migrate to.
I then created a snapshot of the old pool and imported it as a new pool using zfs send -R Pool@migrate | zfs recv -Fdvu Storage. The process ran all night.
Then I removed the disks from the old pool and restarted OpenMedAivault. Only the new pool, named Storage, was available. This was then renamed to the old name using a new export/import sequence so that not all share folders had to be adjusted in OpenMedAivault. This worked, except for two backups.
After that, I had the new pool with almost 29 TB in the system, which offers more than enough space.
But I still had six hard drives left over, for example, to use 2 x 4 TB drives in an external enclosure as replacements for the 4 TB NVMe, because larger NVMe SSDs are simply still too expensive.
Conclusion
The move went really well, apart from a few minor issues, and I’m now very well prepared for the future in terms of hard drive size.
ciao tuxoche
