It looks like S.M.A.R.T has told me that drive in my server is failing. Actually I’ve noticed that when my NFS server just stopped sharing data from it. Still, it was a bad sign, quick look at logs and clear failure messages. Cool.

Short trip to a highstreet shop – Maplin and I’ve grabbed a 1TB Hitachi ( I will never buy Seagate again ). I’ve picked up an Air Duster and 12cm fan as well just as I was there. Fan is for my new PC to keep disks cool.

Open the server, loads and loads of dust, Air Duster gets to work ( someone will kill me as it all came out and dispersed in a nice clean living room ). Swapping the drives. Starting the server.

It takes a bit longer for the server to startup as it was not restarted in ages and all timers told it to rescan all systems properly this time.

Starting Solaris … and my volume with missing disk is … OK … weird. Started zfs scrub on it , just to make sure. Finally it found out that it’s missing a copy, volume is degraded. zfs replace and the rebuild starts, tells me it will be an hour to mirror 750GB back on a new drive.

Now this failure got me thinking if I should replace my VM Host , it’s currently OpenSuse 10 with ancient version of Xen.

I’m wondering if I should put an ESX hypervisor or something else. Certainly my experience with ESX is that it’s rubbish at storage management. I am leaning towards OpenSolaris as it has a selection of hypervisors and storage management just proven to be a breeze.

Will see …