Growing a ZFS Pool

As I was building my media server, I decided I must have support for both network file sharing and DAAP protocol. That way I could (comfortably) listen to my media collection using both my PC and my mobile phone. That simple requirement and fact that I had some experience with FreeNAS 0.7 drove me to NAS4Free.

I installed it in VirtualBox with two virtual drives; one 512 MB and another 2 GB. On smaller one I did embedded install of NAS4Free. Second one I formatted as ZFS (a.k.a. single *nix file system that doesn’t suck on power loss) and assigned to a single ZFS virtual device which was in turn assigned to a single ZFS pool. Both DAAP and samba were then forwarded to this share for their consumables.

Since I naively allocated only 2 GB I soon stumbled upon topic of this blog post. How do I increase my ZFS volume?

Increasing virtual disk is really easy and there is probably handful tools for every disk type (VHD in my case). I decided to use VirtualBox built-in vboxmanage tool (found in VirtualBox’s directory; don’t forget to turn off virtual machine):

VBoxManage.exe modifyhd "D:\Media.vhd" --resize 8192
 0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%

While this was simple enough, it didn’t resolve anything. Next boot-up showed that ZFS still assumed 2 GB as size of a pool (at Disks, ZFS, Pools). If there was only a way for ZFS to recognize disk was bigger…

Fortunately there was just such a command. I went to Advanced, Command and executed following line:

zpool online -e Media-Pool ada1

Media-Pool was name of ZFS pool I was increasing and ada1 was actual physical disk that pool was located on. And that was it, my disk was increased painlessly and without any need for copying data around (except for backup purpose, of course). While it was nowhere close to comfort of using mouse to perform this task in Disk Management, it wasn’t too bad either.

PS: This post assumes that you know how to use NAS4Free. If you don’t use it, do try it out. You’ll love it.

PPS: Essentially same procedure works for FreeNAS or any other situation where you have virtualized disk drive with ZFS pool on it.

[2018-07-22: NAS4Free has been renamed to XigmaNAS as of July 2018]