Viewing Resilvering Status

The process of replacing a drive can take an extended period of time, depending on the size of the drive and the amount of data in the pool. The process of moving data from one device to another device is known as resilvering, and can be monitored by using the zpool status command.

Traditional file systems resilver data at the block level. Because ZFS eliminates the artificial layering of the volume manager, it can perform resilvering in a much more powerful and controlled manner. The two main advantages of this feature are as follows:

• ZFS only resilvers the minimum amount of necessary data. In the case of a short outage (as opposed to a complete device replacement), the entire disk can be resilvered in a matter of minutes or seconds, rather than resilvering the entire disk, or complicating matters with “dirty region” logging that some volume managers support. When an entire disk is replaced, the resilvering process takes time proportional to the amount of data used on disk. Replacing a 500-Gbyte disk can take seconds if only a few gigabytes of used space is in the pool.

• Resilvering is interruptible and safe. If the system loses power or is rebooted, the resilvering process resumes exactly where it left off, without any need for manual intervention.

To view the resilvering process, use the zpool status command. For example:

# zpool status tank
  pool: tank
 state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.  The pool will
        continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.
action: Wait for the resilver to complete.
 scrub: resilver in progress for 0h2m, 16.43% done, 0h13m to go
config:
        NAME                  STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM 
        tank                  DEGRADED     0     0     0
          mirror              DEGRADED     0     0     0
            replacing         DEGRADED     0     0     0
              c1t0d0          ONLINE       0     0     0
              c2t0d0          ONLINE       0     0     0  
            c1t1d0            ONLINE       0     0     0

In this example, the disk c1t0d0 is being replaced by c2t0d0. This event is observed in the status output by the presence of the replacing virtual device in the configuration. This device is not real, nor is it possible for you to create a pool by using this virtual device type. The purpose of this device is solely to display the resilvering progress, and to identify exactly which device is being replaced.

Note that any pool currently undergoing resilvering is placed in the ONLINE or DEGRADED state, because the pool cannot provide the desired level of redundancy until the resilvering process is complete. Resilvering proceeds as fast as possible, though the I/O is always scheduled with a lower priority than user-requested I/O, to minimize impact on the system. Once the resilvering is complete, the configuration reverts to the new, complete, configuration. For example:

# zpool status tank
  pool: tank
 state: ONLINE
scrub: resilver completed after 0h0m with 0 errors on Tue Sep  1 10:55:54 2009
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        tank        ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror    ONLINE       0     0     0
            c2t0d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c1t1d0  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

The pool is once again ONLINE, and the original bad disk (c1t0d0) has been removed from the configuration.