So after a year or so and some recent issues with my "old" trusty Dell R730xd, I've decided to retire her and go with a custom build, which hopefully should result in a more reliable and more eco-friendly (i.e. less electric) system - along with bringing her up to date a little. Nothing out of this world (mu old desktop basically!).

 

So the old system is an R730xd with a 5x6tb SAS drive ZFS array, a 1Tb ssd cache, and a stand alone SSD (that never really gets used to be fair). It;s predominently used for storage, however it also runs around 7 or 8 docker containers. Running 7.0.0.

 

Despite the fact it's 10 years old, it's massively overpowered in more ways that one!

 

The newer system will be a Ryzen 3 3700x based, with an LSI 9400-16i SAS card to run the drives, in a nice fractal designs case. yes, much less power, however its not needed IMO for what it is doing.

 

Its all very well thinking about the system itself, however now that i'm in build phase, my thoughts turn to migration. I'm guessing that there's no way that I'd just be able to move the disks over in order and it will all spring back to life - with a new controller etc.

Is there any documentation, or does anyone have any advise (other than making sure i have a good backup or two!) for doing something like this please?

On a similar note, is there any way to "export" the Docker settings to allow me to re-install these should everything go wrong and retain the config i currently have?

 

Any advise/suggestions welcomed, and many thanks!

Edited March 25, 20251 yr by Toibs

Unraid generally doesn't care about hardware, so everything should just work, as far as the array goes and unraid itself. The only thing that can give trouble is things like if you have hardware passed through, which will be in different slots, and similarly, the network may need to be configured differently, since it's using different MAC-addresses.

 

So, what I would do, disable autostart on the array, the VMs and the dockers, restart the system to make sure everything starts correctly, make a backup of the USB (just in case), shut the server down, move all the drives and USB key to the new server, start the new server, set the network settings for the new system, start the array, if that works, verify the VM and docker settings and start those one by one.

Thank you @Wody - appreciated. Just finishing the build now, hopefully will be able to move things over tomorrow....

 

Will advise how it goes 👍

So finally got around to this today.

 

I decided to rebuild from scratch - as in to look to import the Array and install from scratch. Dropped a mail to the unraid team who advised that they can move the licence from my old USB to my new usb (which is currently running a 30 day trial version) once i am ready. Also means the use of a new USB stick, which is probably long overdue.

 

However - i have moved the SAS drives over, in (as far as i am aware) the same order as my old server, and it beings these online. However it says "Unmountable: wrong or no file system" (ignore the HDD temps - i'll sort that now!)

 

 

However it correctly identifies the array as ZFS..

 

 

Anyone any advice on how to rebuild this? I do have a backup, however ideally being able to recover the ZFS array would save a bunch of time.

 

With regards to the cache drive, this is new to the array... does this just need to be formatted?

 

Thanks

Edited April 5, 20251 yr by Toibs

Please post the diagnostics and the output from 

zpool import