FreeBSD recently introduced a disk replication setup: HAST.
This is FreeBSD’s answer to DRDB for Linux.
Some very good blog posts, with scripting, can be found here:
My issues with HAST are its feeling of instability and the addition of numerous points of failure… sloppy design? The system, essentially, adds “virtual harddrives”. These “virtual harddrives (devices)” sit on top of the drives to be mirrored, the HAST devices receive the data, and then distribute the data to real harddrives on the primary server and to the secondary server. I found this to be a nightmare – more Linux style than FreeBSD.
I would not consider putting HAST in production with ZFS. ZFS is created on top of the “virtual harddrives (devices)”. That is 3 layers (ZFS + HAST devices + actual Harddrives). If HAST messes us, then your ZFS tank disappears. If you restart the HAST daemon then you have to make sure to export your ZFS first. If you do not export the ZFS pool, then ZFS will lock up and a hard reboot is needed. Then on reboot HAST has to be live first, and then your ZFS pool is reimported. All of the aforementioned means downtime. It my lab experiments I simply removed it from the servers and have deemed it not suitable for 24x7x365 applications.
For a ZFS pool replication script visit this post: http://www.tediosity.com/2011/05/31/zfs-replication-on-freebsd/
