Displaying Storage Pool Virtual Device Information

Each storage pool contains one or more virtual devices. A virtual device is an internal representation of the storage pool that describes the layout of physical storage and the storage pool's fault characteristics. As such, a virtual device represents the disk devices or files that are used to create the storage pool. A pool can have any number of virtual devices at the top of the configuration, known as a top-level vdev.

If the top-level virtual device contains two or more physical devices, the configuration provide data redundancy as mirror or RAID-Z virtual devices. These virtual devices consist of disks, disk slices, or files. A spare is a special virtual dev that tracks available hot spares for a pool.

The following example shows how to create a pool that consists of two top-level virtual devices, each a mirror of two disks:

# zpool create tank mirror c1d0 c2d0 mirror c3d0 c4d0

The following example shows how to create pool that consists of one top-level virtual device of four disks:

# zpool create mypool raidz2 c1d0 c2d0 c3d0 c4d0

You can add another top-level virtual device to this pool by using the zpool add command. For example:

# zpool add mypool raidz2 c2d1 c3d1 c4d1 c5d1

Disks, disk slices, or files that are used in nonredundant pools function as top-level virtual devices. Storage pools typically contain multiple top-level virtual devices. ZFS dynamically stripes data among all of the top-level virtual devices in a pool.

Virtual devices and the physical devices that are contained in a ZFS storage pool are displayed with the zpool status command. For example:

# zpool status tank
  pool: tank
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: none requested
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        tank        ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c0t1d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c1t1d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-1  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c0t2d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c1t2d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-2  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c0t3d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c1t3d0  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors