Creating ZFS Storage Pools

This section describes different ways of configuring storage pools. For information about root pools, see Managing the ZFS Root Pool.

When you create a storage pool, you configure virtual devices for the pool. A virtual device is an internal representation of the disk devices or files that are used to create the storage pool and describes the layout of physical storage and the storage pool's fault characteristics. A pool can have any number of virtual devices at the top of the configuration, known as a pool's top-level vdev.

If the top-level virtual device contains two or more physical devices, the configuration provides data redundancy as mirror or RAID-Z virtual devices. Because of the advantages of redundancy, you should create redundant storage pools. ZFS dynamically stripes data among all of the top-level virtual devices in a pool.

Even with a redundant configuration, make sure that you also schedule regular backups of your pool data to non-enterprise grade hardware. Storage pools with ZFS redundancy are not immune to hardware failures, power failures, or disconnected cables. Performing regular backups adds another layer of data protection to your enterprise.

After you create the storage pool, you can display information about it by using the following command:

$ zpool status pool

For more options that you can use with the zpool status command, see Querying ZFS Storage Pool Status.

Observe the following restrictions when creating storage pools:

• Do not repartition or relabel disks that are part of an existing storage pool. Otherwise, you might have to reinstall the OS.

• Do not create a storage pool that contains components from another storage pool, such as files or volumes. Such a configuration can cause deadlocks.

• Do not create a pool to be shared across systems, which is an unsupported configuration. ZFS is not a cluster file system.