creating spare disk

[JL Billman]

I am new to the VA7100 so don't beat me up to bad. First a little history... We have a VA7100 full of 73GB disks. We recently added the last three disks to fill up the array. We added the disks to try and cut down on the rebuild time when a disk craps out. We now understand we need to create 1 or 2 spare disks out of the array to help speed up this process. To help performance we have moved some of the data on the array back to the local machines. We will be deleting the now unused LUN's when we have run the systems for a while.

Can anyone point me to a document on how to create spare drives on the VA7100 arrays when you already have stuff on there?

[Torsten. · Accepted solution]

Hi,

here are the links to the manuals:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/CoreRedirect.jsp?redirectReason=DocIndexPDF&prodSeriesId=64112&targetPage=http%3A%2F%2Fh20000.www2.hp.com%2Fbc%2Fdocs%2Fsupport%2FSupportManual%2Fc00662561%2Fc00662561.pdf

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DocumentIndex.jsp?contentType=SupportManual〈=en&cc=us&docIndexId=179111&taskId=101&prodTypeId=18964&prodSeriesId=64112

There is no real spare disk, you need to reserver space (equal to 1or 2 disks) as spare.

See the manual for more information.

[Torsten.]

This is the explanation:

armmgr -h {None|Automatic|LargestDisk |
LargestTwoDisks}

Specify Hot Spare operation. Default is Automatic.
None - no hot spare.
Automatic - the array will determine the appropriate amount of hot spare
space. For 15 or fewer disks in a redundancy group, the array will reserve
enough capacity to rebuild the largest disk. For 16 or more disks, the
array will reserve enough capacity to rebuild the two largest disks.
LargestDisk - reserve enough space to complete a rebuild after a failure or
removal of the largest drive in the redundancy group.
LargestTwoDisks - reserve enough space to complete a rebuild after a
failure or removal of the largest two drives in the redundancy group.

Hope this helps.

[JL Billman]

Thanks for the info!