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ZFS and disk labels?

J

jarthel

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 24, 2001
Messages
371
I was reading abt migrating my pool into another computer and I came across an old discussion where it seems if the disk has "labels", it won't be as easy to migrate.

I've searched the net for "ZFS label" (without quotes) and I came up blank.

Can someone please explain? thank you
 
Labels refers to system-specific stuff that was added to a disk. Think GPT labels when the target system doesn't understand GPT or info written by a RAID controller when you want to connect them to another controller on the target system. Even using ZFS on MBR partitions is not recommended. If the target system can handle the extra stuff, you'll get your data but normal operation might not be optimal--something related to ZFS being unable to properly turn on/off disk caches?

ZFS should always be given the raw disk, from LBA 0 to the last.
 
So there's partition tables and then there's ZFS labels.

ZFS is going to label the disk in uh.. 4? places, I forget at the moment, believe it's 4. All 4 labels are identical, by the way, they're for redundancy. They contain a multitude of information -- information about what pool the disk belongs to (guid and such), the current txg_id that the disk is on, and information about its fellow disks and pool configuration. They're how ZFS knows what to do with a disk, really.

However what you're talking about, and issues related to 'migrating', are specific to partition table type, I believe. The one I've heard most commonly is if you format the disk on FreeBSD using the a GPT partition table, Solaris won't be able to recognize the disk (there is, btw, a fix for this in the upcoming Nexenta 4.0, I think). This thread mentions it, for instance: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1575034 .
 
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