Blade Logical Drive Conversion - Raid Help!

chuckk281 — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 14:38:23 GMT

Mike had a logical drive question from a customer:

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I have a customer that has some blades setup with 1 logical drive, 1 physical drive raid 0, and they need to configure that logical drive with two physical drives raid 0/1 mirroring. Is there any way to do this without completely rebuilding the logical drive? Can we edit the current logical drive with the desired parameters so we don’t have to redeploy the OS, etc?

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Hiro replied:

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You can use RAID level migration.

(BBWC or FBWC is required to use RAID level migration...)

Configuring Arrays on HP Smart Array Controllers Reference Guide

http://bizsupport2.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00729544/c00729544.pdf

Page 33

Migrate a logical drive

This option enables you to alter the stripe size (data block size), RAID level, or both for a selected logical

drive. For some combinations of initial and final settings of stripe size and RAID level, the array must

contain unused drive space.

IMPORTANT: An array expansion, logical drive extension, or logical drive migration takes about 15

minutes per gigabyte, or considerably longer if the controller does not have a battery-backed cache. While

this process is occurring, no other expansion, extension, or migration can occur simultaneously on the same

controller.

1. Back up all data on the logical drive. Although migration is unlikely to cause data loss, observing

this precaution provides additional data protection.

2. Click Migrate a logical drive, and then click Begin.

3. Select the logical drive, and then click Next.

4. Select the new RAID level, and then click Next.

Only RAID levels that are possible for this configuration are shown. For example, RAID 5 is not listed

if the array has only two physical drives.

5. Select the stripe size. Only stripe sizes that are possible for this configuration are shown.

6. Click Finish to accept the changes.

At this point (before clicking Save in the next step), you can arrange to migrate another logical drive

on the same controller by repeating the previous steps. However, the controller can migrate only one

logical drive at a time. Remaining migrations are queued.

7. Click Save. Migration begins.

To check the progress of a migration, click the icon for that logical drive in the Configuration View panel.

A More Information pop-up window opens that describes the logical drive status.

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Ken also commented:

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You will first need to expand the array to the second, unassigned disk. This process will take a little time to complete. The additional space is then available for logical disk RAID level migration as a second step, as Hiro describes. These steps can be done via the ACU CLI or the GUI interface.

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Any additional comments or suggestions?

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Blade Logical Drive Conversion - Raid Help!