How to create a ZFS filesystem on two striped disk drives

I ran out of space on my SAN drive on the Solaris 10 SPARC server. Since I had two spare disk drives sitting in the server that were not being used, I decided to create a single striped volume out of the two drives. The drives contained the factory installed Solaris 10 image.

Here are the step by step instructions on how to create a ZFS pool on the two hard disks, and then create a single ZFS filesystem.

I tried to create the ZFS pool but received the error message that the drive contains ufs filesystems. This was the factory installed filesystem.

bash-3.00# zpool create backup c0t0d0
invalid vdev specification
use ‘-f’ to override the following errors:
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1 contains a ufs filesystem.
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s2 contains a ufs filesystem.

Use the -f option with the create command to forcefully create the zfs pool.

bash-3.00# zpool create -f backup c0t0d0

Now confirm that the zfs pool was created successfully.

bash-3.00# zpool list
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
backup 136G 76.5K 136G 0% ONLINE –
rpool 348G 221G 127G 63% ONLINE –

Add the second disk drive to the zfs pool backup.

bash-3.00# zpool add backup c0t1d0

Confirm that the second disk was added, the size of backup should have doubled.

bash-3.00# zpool list
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
backup 272G 79.5K 272G 0% ONLINE –
rpool 348G 221G 127G 63% ONLINE –

Create a ZFS filesystem called archive with the zfs create command. It should reside in the backup pool.

bash-3.00# zfs create backup/archive

Confirm that the new zfs filesystem archive was created.

bash-3.00# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
backup 106K 268G 21K /backup
backup/archive 21K 268G 21K /backup/archive
rpool 223G 120G 97K /rpool
rpool/ROOT 4.39G 120G 21K legacy
rpool/ROOT/s10s_u8wos_08a 4.39G 120G 4.39G /
rpool/dump 1.00G 120G 1.00G –
rpool/export 215G 120G 215G /export
rpool/export/home 21K 120G 21K /export/home
rpool/swap 2G 122G 16K –

A ZFS filesystem is automatically mounted after you create it, you can now use the new filesystem archive. If you do not want archive to use all available disk space in the zfs pool backup, then you can define a quota. If you were to create a second filesystem in the backup pool, then the available disk dynamically shared between the two filesystems unless a quota is defined.