topic Re: VA7400 -> how to extend active spare in Disk Enclosures

VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

frey28 — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 06:34:46 GMT

Dear Guru's,

Currently i have 2 disk failed in my va7400. Due to this machine no longer under maintenance contract ( will be decom by end of the year ), how can i extend active spare in the storage?

below are the space configuration capacity for both redundancy group.

Redundancy group 1:

Total = 1.369 TB
Logical Drive = 865 GB
Unallocated = 182 GB
Redundancy = 219 GB
Active Spare = 133 GB

(1 disk failed from this group)

Redundancy group 2:

Total = 1.303 TB
Logical Drive = 868 GB
Unallocated = 121 GB
Redundancy = 211 GB
Active Spare = 133 GB

(1 disk failed from this group)

My questions are:

1) Can i extend the active spare size from above configuration capacity? Currently the hot spare configuration is set to automatic.

2) Is it safe to change the hot spare setting online? is there any bad possibility for the data lost in the VA, cause there are 2 DB servers are attached to this VA.

Re: VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

hvhari — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 06:10:01 GMT

When active hotspare configuration is set to automatic, it reserves size of two largest disks in the array which is the maximum possible. You can reduce it to single disk if the space crunch is too much. However it can impact rebuild time in case of failure. If current rebuild is finished, you can reduce the active hot spare capacity.

The best you can do this at this time, is to replace the failed disks as quickly as possible.

Re: VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

Torsten. — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 06:32:12 GMT

The system does not have a hotspare disk, but reserved space for hotspare across all disks - as long as possible.

Re: VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

frey28 — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:30:00 GMT

Meaning, twolargestdisk configuration is the largest active spare size can be set in va7400? if i still got unused disk space, meaning i cannot simply increase the active spare size?

the reason i am doing this because i don't want to replace the faulty disk that cost me USD1000 per single disk. Some more this system is going to be decommission soon.

Do you have any ideas to maintain the va7400 beside replacing the faulty disk?

Re: VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

hvhari — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 03:21:13 GMT

You can not increase hotspare allocation more than two disk space in the VA.

"Unallocated space" will be used during any disk failure to speed up rebuild. So, if you delete the LUNs and make extra space in "Unallocated space", it will help during any failure. This effectively means you use much less space in VA (the same is the result if you were able to increase hotspare capacity)

Re: VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

Torsten. — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 04:43:50 GMT

Once the rebuild has finished you have again the same space for hotspare - as long as there is enough space.

Re: VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

frey28 — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 01:05:28 GMT

May i know what is redundancy space for?

Re: VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

Torsten. — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 04:43:00 GMT

"May i know what is redundancy space for?"

For redundancy?

This array can do either RAID1 or AUTORAID, this means newer data is in RAID1, older data is converted to RAID5 automatically.

Re: VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

frey28 — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 05:04:32 GMT

meaning, redundancy space is RAID 1? for new data? can u help give me more details in that?

Re: VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

Torsten. — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 05:16:47 GMT

Can you post

# armdsp -a

Re: VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

frey28 — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 05:33:21 GMT

kindly check the attachment.

Re: VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

Torsten. — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 05:43:01 GMT

I there any rebuild running?

# armrbld -p

Re: VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

frey28 — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 05:55:22 GMT

nope.

# armrbld -p va7400
Rebuild status:
Vendor ID = HP
Product ID = A6189A
Rebuild progress = No rebuild in progress

Auto Rebuild is = ENABLED
Rebuild priority is = LOW

The array is not currently rebuilding.

Re: VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

Torsten. — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 06:03:40 GMT

First I would remove the disk with "init failed" status. Check again if a rebuild is running after this.

Re: VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

frey28 — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 06:35:37 GMT

If i remove the init failed disk, and check rebuild process, after that, do i need to swap in back the faulty disk?

Re: VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

frey28 — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 01:33:45 GMT

Dear Torsten,

"Once the rebuild has finished you have again the same space for hotspare - as long as there is enough space."

"as long as there is enough space" - what does you mean here? enough space for what? unallocated space or active spare space?

Re: VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

Torsten. — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 04:55:50 GMT

unallocated space, because this is used for hotspare.