Expanding a Solaris RPOOL

February 18, 2015 admin

For reference I have a couple older articles on this topic here:
http://blog.ls-al.com/growing-a-solaris-ldom-rpool/
http://blog.ls-al.com/zfs-grow-rpool-disk/

Specifically this article is what I did recently on a SPARC LDOM to expand the RPOOL. The RPOOL OS disk is a SAN shared LUN in this case.

After growing the LUN to 50G on the back-end I did the following. You may have to try more than once. For me it did not work at first and I don't know the sequence but I tried a combination of reboot, zpool status, label and verify and it worked. And yes I did say zpool status. I have had issues with upgrades in the past where beadm did not activate a new environment and zpool status resolved it.

Also you will notice my boot partition was already an EFI label. I don't recall where but somewhere along the lines in Solaris 11.1 EFI labels became possible. If you have a SMI label you may have to try a different approach. And as always tinkering with partitions and disk labels is dangerous so you are warned.

# zpool list
NAME    SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
app    49.8G  12.9G  36.9G  25%  1.00x  ONLINE  -
rpool  29.8G  27.6G  2.13G  92%  1.00x  ONLINE  -

# format -e
Searching for disks...done

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
       0. c1d0 <SUN-ZFS Storage 7330-1.0-50.00GB>
          /virtual-devices@100/channel-devices@200/disk@0
       1. c1d1 <Unknown-Unknown-0001-50.00GB>
          /virtual-devices@100/channel-devices@200/disk@1
Specify disk (enter its number): 0
selecting c1d0
[disk formatted]
/dev/dsk/c1d0s0 is part of active ZFS pool rpool. Please see zpool(1M).

[..]

format> verify

Volume name = <        >
ascii name  = <SUN-ZFS Storage 7330-1.0-50.00GB>
bytes/sector    =  512
sectors = 104857599
accessible sectors = 104857566
Part      Tag    Flag     First Sector         Size         Last Sector
  0        usr    wm               256       49.99GB          104841182
  1 unassigned    wm                 0           0               0
  2 unassigned    wm                 0           0               0
  3 unassigned    wm                 0           0               0
  4 unassigned    wm                 0           0               0
  5 unassigned    wm                 0           0               0
  6 unassigned    wm                 0           0               0
  7 unassigned    wm                 0           0               0
  8   reserved    wm         104841183        8.00MB          104857566

[..]

format> label
[0] SMI Label
[1] EFI Label
Specify Label type[1]:
Ready to label disk, continue? y

format> q

# zpool list
NAME    SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
app    49.8G  12.9G  36.9G  25%  1.00x  ONLINE  -
rpool  29.8G  27.6G  2.13G  92%  1.00x  ONLINE  -

# zpool set autoexpand=on rpool

# zpool list
NAME    SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
app    49.8G  12.9G  36.9G  25%  1.00x  ONLINE  -
rpool  49.8G  27.6G  22.1G  55%  1.00x  ONLINE  -