I am thinking about investing on the multi threaded Ryzens and I am worried about the transition.
My system is currently working around an Intel i7-860 throwing its heat (95 tdp) on a p7p55d deluxe asus mobo caching on 4gigs of DDR3 ram
Rockstor is exploiting the nice speed of an SSD drive whereas my data is stored on a raid1 pool consisting of 3 wd reds.
Finally, all networking is being handled by an intel pci card.
The plan is to go to an asus am4 mobo housing a ryzen 5 and 16gigs of ddr4.
How can I make my new system easily identify my raid1 pool?
Please explain as simply as possible since this will be my first attempt to this endeavor.
@Sky12016 As @vesper1978 mentions a pool can just be imported on a new Rockstor install but given:
You might want to just move the existing ssd over to the new machine along with all it’s data pool drives. If all is well it should just boot on the new hardware and be dandy. Although it may take a reboot or two to get it’s network bearings. That way you Appliance ID will also stay the same as it will travel with your current install.
Not sure if I’ve gotten the wrong end of the stick on this one but thought I’d just chip in anyway.
I was already writing back to @vesper1978 when I saw your post.
The thing is that the import disk process requires reinstalling Rockstor while I would like to keep my current installation intact (if possible).
If I move all of my disks (4) and my Intel pci card to my new setup (mobo-cpu-ram) as you propose, wont there be any issues with the (different) storage controller? Or is this another centos/linux treat?
I have no problem to re-configure my network if all my installation can be moved just like that.
The linux kernel generally comes with all ‘out of the box’ drivers pre-installed so as long as the kernel on your system disk supports the new hardware it should auto load whatever is required. On the Rockstor side we are a level up from that and simply need to read disk serial numbers to track devices. And in turn we then use pool name and share id. We have in process some changes that will move our code over to pool uuid instead of name but they are not yet in place fully. So we have work to do in that area but it has begun.
So yes you should be good to move the system disk along with all the data disks and hopefully it should be able to pickup where it left off. Obviously we are talking of many moving parts here (the entirety of the hardware bar the drives and pci network card) but linux is generally quiet good at that so Rockstor inherits that. This all assumes you are using host bus adaptors (HBA’s) on the existing board and the new board as there are differences between how hardware / firmware raid controllers format their devices but you make no mention of that.
Also take care to match to boot modes between the 2 motherboards, ie Legacy boot / secure boot settings as given it’s booting OK on your old Asus you should be able to reproduce the same settings in the new system prior to moving the system disk over. That should help to smooth the way some what also.
Always best to do a backup prior to making any changes of course and that has to be the advice in this case but in many smaller (read non commercial) settings there is often not the space / hardware to do that. Still if the data is important then you have to assess what it is worth to you in comparison to what a backup would cost. All obvious stuff but yes you should be able to move system disk and data disks, in one go, to the new machine. Just don’t risk doing any live plugging / unplugging as both btrfs and Rockstor are just not there on that front yet.
Hope that helps and do let us know how this goes. I’ve had initial network issues myself doing this on occasions and subsequent reboots have managed to fix it. Plus you can always ask again on the forum and be prepared for a little too and fro as the required information is exchanged to narrow down any problem you might run into. It may be that you moving your intel network card helps with this move as the Network config in Rockstor will at least still relate to the same hardware but it’s difficult to tell really.
That Asus AM4 looks like a fancy bit of kit. I like Asus stuff myself and use an older Intel variant in my main desktop.
All my disks are currently connected to the native sata ports of my motherboard and the same setup will be reproduced on my new mobo. The Raid1 configuration is being handled from Rockstor so no separate raid controller here.
With regard to backup, I am already backing up my data pool to external disks since I can’t afford losing my data! And as for my system disk I will try clonezilla in order to create a full disk image over samba. As I haven’t tried that before I may need some assistance down the road.
I will also try to replicate the bios settings before plugging in the drives. The one thing that worries me though is that due to an issue I had with my Intel NIC going to sleep and losing connectivity; I have tempered with GRUB settings and turned acpi off (pci=noacpi). This has fixed the connectivity issue but has rendered my system unable to shutdown. Every time I issue the command to shutdown (either from rockstor or from command line) the system reboots instead. I don’t know how the new mobo will play along with these settings but I guess I will have to wait and see.
I have been using ASUS for a long time now and overall my experience has been pretty smooth.
If it works, stick with it.