topic Re: HF20 expansion shelf hot or not? in Array Setup and Networking

HF20 expansion shelf hot or not?

jondyke — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 13:18:48 GMT

I have recenly purchased an expansion shelf for my HF20. Was about to hot add it but noriced a line on the

Caution!
• When you activate the expansion shelf, there is a momentary pause in data service
from the array. You might need to activate the expansion shelf during a
maintenance windows.

As I have both VMware and SQL running on the HF20 is it safe to add a new shelf hot or do I need really need to schedule in maintenance on both VMware and SQL (which would be pretty disruptive!)?

Would be interested to hear if other people have added them hot without issue.

Thanks,

Jon

Re: HF20 expansion shelf hot or not?

Nick_Dyer — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 13:55:03 GMT

Hi Jon,

'activating' a Nimble expansion shelf is the same as when you do a NimbleOS upgrade. IO will pause for a few seconds, as we restart the data service daemon to build the new RAID set on the shelf.

Lots of customers add shelves do this work without stopping apps / VMs, there should be no reason to schedule a maintenence window. That said, I would always recommend hitting the "activate" button out of hours. Just because

Re: HF20 expansion shelf hot or not?

Sheldon Smith — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 13:56:19 GMT

Can the system be failed over to the other controller with no issues from the I/O pause? There is roughly 1/3rd of that pause when activating the shelf.

Re: HF20 expansion shelf hot or not?

jondyke — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 14:28:04 GMT

Thanks for the reply Nick.