Upgrading ZFS Storage Pools

With the zpool upgrade command, you can upgrade ZFS storage pools from a previous Oracle Solaris release.

Before using the command, use the zpool status command to check whether the pools were configured with a ZFS version that is previous to the version currently on the system. Also, consider displaying the features of the current ZFS version on the system by using the -v option as shown below:

$ zpool upgrade -v

The list of features would vary depending on the ZFS version number on the system. See ZFS Pool Versions for a complete list.

Use the -a option to upgrade the pools and take advantage of the latest ZFS features.

$ zpool upgrade -a

After you upgrade the pools, they are no longer accessible on a system that is running a previous ZFS version.

Example 5-1 Upgrading ZFS Pools

This example shows the actions to upgrade pools.

$ zpool status
  pool: system1
 state: ONLINE
status: The pool is formatted using an older on-disk format.  The pool can
        still be used, but some features are unavailable.
action: Upgrade the pool using 'zpool upgrade'.  Once this is done, the
        pool will no longer be accessible on older software versions.
 scrub: none requested
config:
        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        system1     ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c1t0d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c1t1d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
errors: No known data errors

$ zpool upgrade -v
This system is currently running ZFS pool version version-number.

The following versions are supported:

VER  DESCRIPTION
---  --------------------------------------------------------
1   Initial ZFS version
2   Ditto blocks (replicated metadata)
3   Hot spares and double parity RAID-Z
4   zpool history
5   Compression using the gzip algorithm
.
.
Additional features

$ zpool upgrade -a