ZFS on Linux: Storage setup

For my media storage, I’m using a 500GB 5400 RPM USB drive. Since my Linux ZFS backup server is a virtual machine under VirtualBox, in order for the VM to be able to access the entire USB drive completely, the VirtualBox Extension Pack add-on needs to be installed.

The VirtualBox Extension Pack for all versions can be found on the VirtualBox website. It is important that the Extension Pack installed must be for the same version as VirtualBox~

wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.1.12/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.1.12.vbox-extpack
VBoxManage extpack install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.1.12.vbox-extpack

Additionally, it is also important that the user which VirtualBox will run under is member of the vboxusers group.

groups tony
tony : tony adm cdrom sudo dip plugdev lpadmin sambashare
sudo usermod -G  adm,cdrom,sudo,dip,plugdev,lpadmin,sambashare,vboxusers tony
groups tony
tony : tony adm cdrom sudo dip plugdev lpadmin sambashare vboxusers

Since my computer is already using two other 500GB external USB drives, I had to properly identify the drive that I wanted to use for my ZFS data. This was a really simple process (I don’t give a flying fuck about sharing my drive’s serial).

sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdd|grep Serial
  Serial Number:      J2260051H80D8C
  Transport:          Serial, ATA8-AST, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5, SATA Rev 2.6; Revision: ATA8-AST T13 Project D1697 Revision 0b

Now that I know the serial number of the USB drive, I can configure my VirtualBox Linux ZFS server VM to automatically use the drive.

At this point I’m about to use the 500 GB hard drive as /dev/sdb under my Linux ZFS server and use it to create ZFS pools and file systems.

zpool create pool backups /dev/sdb
zfs create backups/dhcp

Since I haven’t used ZFS on Linux extensively before, I’m manually mounting my ZFS pool after a reboot.

root@backup ~]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root
                      3.5G  1.6G  1.8G  47% /
tmpfs                 1.5G     0  1.5G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1             485M   67M  393M  15% /boot
[root@backup ~]# zpool import
   pool: backups
     id: 15563678275580781179
  state: ONLINE
 action: The pool can be imported using its name or numeric identifier.
 config:

  backups     ONLINE
    sdb       ONLINE
[root@backup ~]# zpool import backups
[root@backup ~]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root
                      3.5G  1.6G  1.8G  47% /
tmpfs                 1.5G     0  1.5G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1             485M   67M  393M  15% /boot
backups               446G  128K  446G   1% /backups
backups/afs           447G  975M  446G   1% /backups/afs
backups/afs2          447G  750M  446G   1% /backups/afs2
backups/bashninja     448G  1.4G  446G   1% /backups/bashninja
backups/debian        449G  2.5G  446G   1% /backups/debian
backups/dhcp          451G  4.4G  446G   1% /backups/dhcp
backups/macbookair    446G  128K  446G   1% /backups/macbookair
backups/monitor       447G  880M  446G   1% /backups/monitor
backups/monitor2      446G  128K  446G   1% /backups/monitor2
backups/rubyninja.net
                      446G  128K  446G   1% /backups/rubyninja.net
backups/rubysecurity  447G  372M  446G   1% /backups/rubysecurity
backups/solaris       446G  128K  446G   1% /backups/solaris
backups/ubuntu        446G  128K  446G   1% /backups/ubuntu

Tags: [ ubuntu centos virtualbox zfs ]

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