Adding disks in ESXi to OpenSolaris

Cool, I’ve got my VM up and running with OpenSolaris 2008.05 @ snv_95 in ESXi 3.5 U2 on my nice new server.

Now – to add more disks. I wanted to add 3 new hard disks to use RAID-Z. Obviously I would be using 3 physically seperate disks, but make vmdk’s on each of them. I wanted to do this without rebooting at all, and manged it. Here’s how:

1. Create new DataStores in the VMware Infrastructure Manager.
2. Add 3 new virtual hard disks to the VM, making sure they are all the same size but on 3 different data stores.
3. Apply the changes
4. SSH into the VM (or use the console… SSH is better)

5. pfexec devfsadm -c disk

6. pfexec zpool create <name here> raidz c4t1d0p0 c4t2d0p0 c4t3d0p0

Obviously device nodes might be different, those were what they were for me. Was very nice to be able to do this with zero downtime on the server itself.

Step 5 forces Solaris to reload the /dev structure in relation to disks. Means all the new /dev/rdsk and /dev/dsk nodes are created without the normal reboot. Step 6, obviously, is the creation of the zpool. Once you have that – go ahead and store lots of stuff!