How to make drive offline on VA7400

[Saulius_1]

Hi,

I'm lost in searching the way to offline some drives in our VA array. When I try to to do so using CV/SDM - it offers me bunch of choices which talk about data loss. I don't want to lose data on the luns, however I want drives to be taken out of array as spares (we have loads of free space and no support).

Has anyone tried to offline drive included in the array ?

Saulius

[Vincent Fleming]

Just pull one out at a time - giving LOTS of time for the data to be rebuilt on the remaining drives and load leveling to occur. Usually you can remove about 1 or 2 drives a day this way.

The VA will think the drive just died.

But be CAREFUL - be SURE that it's finished rebuilding before you pull another drive.

Of course, a full backup is highly suggested - just in case.

Good luck,

Vince

[Saulius_1]

It seems I can just fail the drive with armcfg, however main question - will I be able to reuse it in same VA ? Reason why I want to pull out the disks - is to make some "spare drive" (we canceled HP support, and to move some disks from one redundancy group to another. This makes things a bit complicated - isn't it ? :)

Saulius

[Vincent Fleming]

Hmm... I'm not sure what it will do.

It's likely that it wouldn't do anything "bad" if you removed a drive from an "odd" slot, and inserted it into an "even" slot (thus changing redundancy group that the drive is in), but it may not do exactly what you want.

Perhaps someone else reading this has tried it, and will give you feedback.

If not, I would do a full backup, and try it (I'm pretty brave, though!).

I would wait for the VA to recover from the removal before inserting the drive into the new slot; just as a precaution.

Regrards,

Vince