topic Re: System Clone a BL860c in BladeSystem - General

System Clone a BL860c

Jay Savage — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:51:02 GMT

I have a loaner C7000 chassis with 4 x BL860c blades, one of the blades has been created as a Ignite server. The new production frames have arrived, but unfortunately I have to shutdown and remove the loaner before I can install the new production chassis.

I want to swap the 2 x internal drives that are managed by the SASMGR in hardware raid to the new blade so I can Ignite the new blades. However, in a test of this procedure, I shutdown the O/S (11.31) and powered down the blades and swapped the drives between two of the blades. On powering up the blades both were unable to recognize the internal drives. I think the raid array may have disabled or inactivated the drives.

Does anyone know of a procedure that would allow me to do this?

Re: System Clone a BL860c

Torsten. — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:53:59 GMT

You probably need to activate the RAID again.

Use drvcfg to do this. More info needed?

Re: System Clone a BL860c

Jay Savage — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:36:16 GMT

Reactivating the RAID Controller seems to be the answer. From the EFI shell> drvcfg -s

then manage the array, then reactivate the array. let the controller reset, then reset the blade from the efi shell.

Couple of things I didn't normally have to do:

It still acted like the O/S boot drive wasn't online. So I changed to the boot drive via EFI> fs0:
then typed: hpux
this started the boot process on the swapped drive.

Not sure why the array deactivates, but as long as this is working we can shorten the amount of time we need to bring the new chassis online.

Re: System Clone a BL860c

Torsten. — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:21:25 GMT

The EFI boot entry is stored in the NVRAM of the other server. You need to set it again.

Use "setboot" from running hp-ux.

Re: System Clone a BL860c

Jay Savage — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:07:19 GMT

Yeah, this is a test to make sure this is a feasible option so I'll switch the drives back. I just needed to get a procedure in place so when we install the new chassis I can move the ignite server in place without reinstalling the O/S via the USB DVD drive and causing some considerable time required to recreate the ignite server. The first time I tried this I thought the O/S had been blanked on the drives since they weren't showing up as valid anymore.

Once I get it switched to the new blade I'll do the setboot...

We normally use software raid via lvm on our other Itanium/PA-RISC servers, the hardware raid/SASMGR is throwing us for a little bit of a loop.