How Easy is Moving FreeNAS Drives From One Server to Another? Very Easy!

so let's talk about FreeNAS and what happens when you have some old hardware and you go hey I got this other hardware and it's better and I want to move everything over there but I'm afraid that if I move it everything will break when I put it over here well let's talk through this real quick and it's this is a short video because this is actually pretty simple of FreeNAS I almost think some people are conditioned to the way Windows works and I know it's gotten better with more recent versions of Windows but changing hardware prompts the device manager to go crazy especially older versions of Windows in case you can just not work you can't easily just take I'm just going to move everything from here especially because this is Intel architecture this is an AMD board I'm moving this too this has a Raider II here we're gonna get to in a second this just has SATA ports how does that all work do I have to back it up well I break my ZFS pools but I be able to import them how do you know will any of this work good news freenas freebsd linux based distributions generally don't have problem moving from hardware platform the other things you do have to note first we'll talk about the network we will have to reset the network now if you have a program to a network card and you use the same network card in both devices that actually makes it really easy so if I had a network card I move it over here it'll go hey I know the settings for that network card because I had it over here and it'll work we're actually going to walk through how to change the network settings is purposely for this video demo we're swapping network cards now when it comes to the radar rate if you followed proper guides for building your freenas you would not have set this up with the bios raid never setup FreeNAS on a bios raid the ideal way to do it is to pass each hard drive through most read cards have that option like to pass the drives through over to the motherboard or directly to the OS I mean so they can control it this is the ideal way to set up free nan so if you have one of the you know let's say you have a Dell with one of the perk controllers you don't want to use that controller to set up your raid array you want to have each Drive passed off to the operating system now I know there's going to be some weird exceptions there's probably some weird cards that are out there that maybe don't support that well then also makes them less than ideal for setting up with free now FreeNAS should be in direct control the hardware that's how ZFS and you get all the benefits out of the entire NASA operating system as it's built is to have everything directly interacting and they sell lots of different cards you can find on some of the guides I'm gonna do a guide pretty soon on custom building your own FreeNAS with one of those so let's get back to this so this machine works perfectly fine I'm actually switching it because this has more memory I don't have more memory laying around for this and I have some demos coming up behind FreeNAS so let's get to switch it now first thing is obviously I could if I really felt inspired pull this whole j-bad thing out which hard to do from this side but we're just gonna remove all the drives from here they're all SATA drives on the interface so the interface is Samer it's gonna pop them all into this system here now the boot drive good news is this thing actually is I only have one I know you should run it on redundantly but it has one USB drive that's loaded with FreeNAS we're just gonna remove that drive and put it over into the other machine so no big deal this one also has internal connectors for it so nice and convenient and I'm gonna move all the drives over here and I'm gonna show you and walk you through the networking step that comes after this because when we swap it it's gonna not see the same network cards and we're gonna get this set up alright so let's get moving alright for purposes of video please ignore the disastrous cable management cuz I'm not gonna take the time right now to mount the hard drives cuz actually have some different drives I'll probably use for this demo specifically so here's our freelance machine it's ready to boot probably the network won't work let's find out press enter whoops better I just had paused it so I could up do the video here so it's booting up now first thing you may have noticed the drives are just sitting here you're probably going Tom did you take them out and order did you plug the first drive in the cable one it's a second drive and a cable too good news Prine s don't care the way ZFS works is not by saying port one on the SATA controller or goes to this specific hard drive in port two goes to that specific hard drive you can mix and match the hard drives around two different ports FreeNAS is fine with that that's not how logical the ZFS Ottoman each Drive has the data for the pool written to it so they can pull through and we go through and import the pool's Sooni and as it imports the pools it doesn't care where they're plugged in so if we move them all over one port and reboot this machine it's not going to matter if you do it live you're going to have problems but you're gonna see it's gonna boot up here and find the volumes have all the information we got our USB Drive plugged in right here and away we go actually link state changed up let's see if they're not working actually just picked up and worked on this if not I'm going to walk you through how to reset the networking which is pretty easy just do it from the command interface here Coffee is an important thing to have while you're waiting for free naps to boot up here we have our volume import successful GFS import complete no link DCP effort wow it actually found the network card so apparently these boards have the same network interface so there's not actually any interface changes I need to do but I'll walk you through real quick convenient to do them you just simply choose option one choose the interface you want to configure we're not going to delete it I'm not going to reset it we can configure it say yes give it a name type in an IP address netmask no one needs ipv6 and away we go so that's it for moving FreeNAS from one machine to another and we've now crossed over architecture types that was an Intel this is an AMD Opteron chip completely different motherboard HP versus I believe this is a Super Micro and also you know going from the architecture tips means even the controller is very different one has the raid controller but the drives were set to pass through right to the FreeNAS which that's an important aspect this would not have worked if that was not the case but that's it you can swap it this is also one of the reasons I like FreeNAS because importing a ZFS pool even if I were to lose this the thumb drive with the food information on there as long as I had the password for the hard drives the key file if the drives were encrypted when I have a video on how to back that up which is highly important you could still recover to ZFS this is an advantage you have over proprietary nass systems and I seen a video the other day it was so much Hagman and I've complained about this before when you buy some of these uniquely proprietary Nantz systems that if there's a failure it's not as easy to recover from you know you should always have backups well we know people don't always back up the put data on there and they didn't get to backing it up yet so that's can be an issue but you can feel confident that as you do upgrades your freenas will upgrade with you and we've done that to our pronounce it has been in place since version eight or nine I've been so long in so many years and no parts are really the same it's the same names of the servers but we've swapped out hard drives over time we've completely changed out the body of it we put it in a larger j-bot so it free now has grown with us and each of the drives has traveled along the way or even the ones that didn't make it and didn't survive we replaced out and the ZFS array is the same it's like that ax the two-hundred-year-old ax that the handle and the head have been replaced so many times same concept thank you for watching and hopefully this was helpful and give you a little bit more confidence in FreeNAS and moving things around between different Hardware tits you don't have to worry as much I still recommend backing up a case it all goes wrong because anytime you're messing with computer hardware and stacking hard drives in a messy way like this things could go wrong but it does work thanks for watching if you like this video go ahead and click the thumbs up leave us some feedback below to let us know any details what you liked and didn't like as well because we love hearing the feedback or if you just want to say thanks leave a comment if you wanted to be notified of new videos as they come out go ahead and to subscribe and the Bell icon that lets YouTube know that you're interested in notifications hopefully they send them as we've learned with YouTube anyways if you want to contract us for consulting services you go ahead and hit orange systems comm and you can reach out to us for all the projects that we can do and help you we work with a lot of small businesses IT companies even some large companies and you can farm different work out to us or just hire us as a consultant to help design your network also if you want to help the channel other ways we have a patreon we have affiliate links you'll find them in a description you'll also find recommendations to other affiliate links and things you can sign up for on Lauren systems comm once again thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 54,186

Keywords: home server, freenas 11, home server build, network attached storage 2018, freenas, network attached storage, nas, zfs, open source, storage, freenas (software), freebsd, tutorial, freenas migration, truenas, ixsystems

Id: _DmMpETyBsY

Length: 9min 16sec (556 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 10 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/ndboost]

tldw; FreeNAS can import disks from another system fine, as long as its the same ZFS version on pools. It doesn't even care if you use the same order for the drives, each drive gets a unique GUID that it uses to track. Either way, Thomas does a good job of explaining this. Nice video!

[u/NiftyMist]

Tom is great. Been following his channel for the better part of a year now!