Attach disk to ZFS mirror on Solaris

I have a ZFS pool (mirror) with two SATA disks on Solaris 11 running on my HP Microserver Gen8. Both of the disks are Toshiba 3T desktop disk, and they are more than 4 years old. The pool stores all my photos so I think I’d better add one more disk to back it up.

I purchased HP Disk (6G SATA Non-Hot Plug LFF (3.5-inch) Midline (MDL) Drives), which is recommended on Gen8’s Specs (628065-B21, https://www.hpe.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c04128132.pdf), and it comes with 1 year warranty.

HP-Disk-1

HP-Disk-2

Mount the disk to the career
HP-Disk-3-Mounted

Insert the career into Gen8 and power it on, you can see from the POST screen that the new disk is detected by Gen8.
HP-Disk-4-Bootscreen

But, GNU GRUB failed to boot the Solaris.
HP-Disk-6-grub-invalid-signature

I installed Solaris 11 on my PLEXTOR SSD, which was connected the Port 5 (originally designed for Optical Drive) on MicroServer Gen8. Gen8 does not support boot directly from Port 5, but does support boot from internal Micro SD card. So I installed GNU GRUB on SD card, then boot the Solaris 11 which was installed on SSD at port 5.
HP-Disk-5-grub-screen

Because I added a new disk, so the order of the SSD at port 5 had been changed from 3 to 4.
HP-Disk-7-grub-edit

The fix is simple. Power off Gen8, remove the SD card, mount it to your system (eg: Macbook), update the order number of the SSD in GRUB configuration file at /boot/grub/grub.cfg, then re-install the SD card, boot successfully!
HP-Disk-8-grub-fix

After logged into Solaris, list the zpool and its status

root@solar:~# zpool list
NAME    SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
rpool   118G  14.2G   104G  12%  1.00x  ONLINE  -
sp     2.72T   315G  2.41T  11%  1.00x  ONLINE  -
 
root@solar:~# zpool status
  pool: rpool
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:
 
        NAME      STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        rpool     ONLINE       0     0     0
          c3t4d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 
errors: No known data errors
 
  pool: sp
 state: ONLINE
  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 3h51m with 0 errors on Sat Aug  5 13:02:29 2017
config:
 
        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        sp          ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c3t0d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c3t1d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 
errors: No known data errors

You can see here I have one pool named *sp* which is a mirror (mirror-0) which was build over two disks, c3t0d0 and c3t1d0.

Then use format to identify the new disk.

root@solar:~# format
Searching for disks...done
 
c2t0d0: configured with capacity of 1.83GB
c2t0d1: configured with capacity of 254.00MB
 
 
AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
       0. c2t0d0 <hp iLO-Internal SD-CARD-2.10 cyl 936 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32>
          /pci@0,0/pci103c,330d@1d/hub@1/hub@3/storage@1/disk@0,0
       1. c2t0d1 </hp><hp iLO-LUN 01 Media 0-2.10 cyl 254 alt 2 hd 64 sec 32>
          /pci@0,0/pci103c,330d@1d/hub@1/hub@3/storage@1/disk@0,1
       2. c3t0d0 <ata -TOSHIBA DT01ACA3-ABB0-2.73TB>
          /pci@0,0/pci103c,330d@1f,2/disk@0,0
       3. c3t1d0 </ata><ata -TOSHIBA DT01ACA3-ABB0-2.73TB>
          /pci@0,0/pci103c,330d@1f,2/disk@1,0
       4. c3t2d0 </ata><ata -MB3000GDUPA-HPG4-2.73TB>
          /pci@0,0/pci103c,330d@1f,2/disk@2,0
       5. c3t4d0 </ata><ata -PLEXTOR PX-128M5-1.05-119.24GB>
          /pci@0,0/pci103c,330d@1f,2/disk@4,0
</ata></hp>

The disk with ID c3t2d0 is the one I just added to Gen8.

Attach the new disk into existing pool.

root@solar-1:~# zpool attach sp c3t1d0 c3t2d0

Check the status of pool again

root@solar-1:~# zpool status -v
  pool: rpool
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:
 
        NAME      STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        rpool     ONLINE       0     0     0
          c3t4d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 
errors: No known data errors
 
  pool: sp
 state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.  The pool will
        continue to function in a degraded state.
action: Wait for the resilver to complete.
  scan: resilver in progress since Sat Sep 30 01:30:55 2017
    315G scanned
    39.2G resilvered at 119M/s, 12.42% done, 0h39m to go
config:
 
        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        sp          DEGRADED     0     0     0
          mirror-0  DEGRADED     0     0     0
            c3t0d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c3t1d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c3t2d0  DEGRADED     0     0     0  (resilvering)
 
device details:
 
        c3t2d0    DEGRADED        scrub/resilver needed
        status: ZFS detected errors on this device.
                The device is missing some data that is recoverable.
           see: http://support.oracle.com/msg/ZFS-8000-QJ for recovery
 
 
errors: No known data errors

Here it shows that the pool is *DEGRADED*, and it is resilvering, that means it is copying data from the existing disks to the new one, and it gives the size of data and estimation.

After the resilvering finished

root@solar-1:~# zpool status -v
  pool: rpool
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:
 
        NAME      STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        rpool     ONLINE       0     0     0
          c3t4d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 
errors: No known data errors
 
  pool: sp
 state: ONLINE
  scan: resilvered 315G in 0h46m with 0 errors on Sat Sep 30 02:17:11 2017
config:
 
        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        sp          ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c3t0d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c3t1d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c3t2d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
 
errors: No known data errors

New disk had been added and synced successfully!