Creating Pools

It is advised to read the About Pools section prior to creating a pool as the pool configuration cannot be changed later without migrating data.

To create a new pool:

  1. Navigate to the Pools - Inventory page.

  2. Click the Create pool button located on the toolbar.

    The Create pool button is only available when 1 or more unused/available disk device(s) are present. Unused or available disk device is a device which does not belong to any other pools.

    create pool button

  3. Enter a name for the pool (ex: p01).

  4. Select a VDEV type.

    select vdev type

  5. Select a Drive Type.

    • A grouping of storage devices of similar characteristics such as Type, Size, and Vendor

      select drive type

  6. Provide the number of VDEVs the pool will contain (not applicable to disk VDEV type).

    provide vdev count

  7. Provide the number of Drives per VDEV (not applicable to disk/mirror VDEV type).

    provide drive per vdev

  8. Provide the number of Drives (only applicable to disk VDEV type).

    provide drive count

  9. Provide the number of Spare Drives. to be reserved for the pool.

    provide spare count

  10. Click Create Pool to complete the creation.

Pool Configuration Wizard

The Pool Configuration Wizard is designed to improve your understanding of the different components when creating a pool.

Total Drives in Drive Type = VDEV Count * Drives per VDEV + Spares.

Drive Type

A summary of all available/unused drives present on the system. Drives are grouped by their unique configurations.

select drive type

Configuration Syntax: [size] [type] ([speed]) [vendor] [quantity]

  • Size - The capacity of a disk device in bytes

  • Type - The kind of disk device such as:

    • SED - Self-Encrypting Drive

    • Virtual - A logical drive that exists within virtualization solutions

    • SSD - Solid-State Drive

    • USB - Universal Series Bus

    • NVMe - Nonvolatile Memory Express

    • RAID - RAID Volume

    • Fabric - iSCSI or FibreChannel LUN

  • Speed - RPM speed of a disk; applies only to mechanical drives

  • Vendor - Device manufacturer

  • Quantity - Total number of devices of this type

VDEV Count

VDEV Count is the number of of RAID drive groups, providing increased performance and higher storage capacity. However, VDEV Count does not offer fault tolerance and should be configured with pool type offering parity.

Drives per VDEV

Drives per VDEV are used to quantify the amount of disk devices within each VDEV. Increasing the Drives per VDEV provides an increase in availability/parity to every VDEV at the cost of performance and storage.

Drives

Exclusively for pools with the disk VDEV Type, each drive that is added will act as its own VDEV for maximum performance and storage.