TrueNAS Tutorial: Expanding Your ZFS RAIDz VDEV with a Single Drive [YouTube Release]

Youtube Releases
1

Additional Resources:

My Previos Video on TrueNAS: How To Expand A ZFS Pool

TrueNAS Scale 24.10 Documentation Managing Pools | TrueNAS Documentation Hub

ZFS In Place Rebalancing Script

FreeBSD Developer Summit: Raid-Z Expansion video
https://youtu.be/yF2KgQGmUic?si=9qk66NC_xF8BIKWQ

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Chapters
00:00 Expanding Your ZFS RAIDz VDEV
01:20 The Ad
02:12 RAIDz VDEV Expansion Requirements
04:05 How To Extend RAIDz in TrueNAS
08:15 Changing RAIDz or Mirrored VDEVs

2

This might be a bigger question than should be asked on Youtube comments.

When you go and rebalance the vdev, does that script still work when you are running something like XCP-NG and using Truenas as it’s storage?

I ask because I can see this being my biggest use case and also something that is most easily tested in my lab if I burn it down and start from scratch again (kind of time for this again anyway).

3

It will work with NFS, but if you do it while the systems are online they will get corrupted. Also, it’s not really that necessary especially because as the new writes are committed they will be at the larger width.

4

That’s what I was thinking, so if you migrate a VM, it might end up at the larger width.

I can see having large enough local storage or a second NAS as still being an asset for XCP-NG. It’s nice to move the VMs off to another place to work on the NAS for updates, etc.

5

Bah, just my luck that I originally went with mirror pairs with my 4 drive array. Look like I’m going to have to build a new NAS at some point in the future. Probably will go with a 4 drive RAIDZ2 for now and then add two more drives down the road when needed.