I have been using ZFS on Linux for some time to provide backup appliance using zfs-fuse. Since then, we got native ZFS implementation on Linux, so I decided to move by backup pool from zfs-fuse to in-kernel ZFS.
Additional reason to move pool over to new machine was to change pool's RAID level. In current ZFS implementation(s) you can't change mirror to RAIDZ1 without re-creating pool and then transfering data over using zfs send and zfs receive. However, when you are creating snapshots for years, and expiring them using script you will have hundreds of snapshots which you need to transfer.
This is where zfs-pool-replicate.pl script comes handy. It uses Net::OpenSSH to connect to two machines (source and destination), list all snapshots on source and transfer them to destination. If you have filesystem without snapshots it will create one @send snapshot which will be transferred. It will also optionally use compression for transfer of snapshot over the network. I am using LZO which is fast compression which nicely transfers 150Mb/s or more over normal 1Gbit/s network without much CPU overheard (and we all have multi-core machines anyway, right?). Current implementation allows you to re-run replication script to transfer only new snapshots creating handy disaster recovery solution.
Current implementation is designed to run from third (management) machine, so I can envision central storage administration tool which will also allow you to transfer LVM snapshots into ZFS snapshots. For now, I'm using shell script for that, but rewriting it in perl would improve error recovery and reporting.
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