Replacing Disks in VA7100

[Charles McCary]

Group, Hi - I currently have the 33gb disk drives in my VA7100, and I want to swap them out (one at a time) with 78gb drives to increase capacity. My question is what is the right procedure to do this?

I know there's a way to mark the disk down through commandview, should I do this first, then replace it and wait on a rebuild - OR - should I just go up, pull the old disk out, put the new one in and wait on the rebuild. Here's what I think the proper procedure might be, let me know where I'm wrong.

1) Down the disk using command view.

2) Remove the old disk.

3) Wait on Array to rebuild.

4) After Rebuild insert new larger disk.

5) Wait on array to rebuild.


Repeat steps 1-5 as neccessary.

thanks,

c

[Eugeny Brychkov]

I agree. But before doing it:
a) check if VA is ok ('armdsp -a');
b) backup all data;
c) check if VA has firmware HP18 and battery firmware 4.3. If not, call HP and schedule update.
If you wish you can attach armpds -a output to your next reply
Eugeny

[Vincent Fleming]

I would rather see you do a backup and restore operation - backup the array, reconfigure it, and restore.

You can do what you suggest, but timing is important, and if you remove a drive before the rebuild completes, you can trash the parity group. So it's error-prone, which makes me nervous.

Good luck,

Vince

[Charles McCary]

Thanks - appreciate your concern. But we're dealing with an amount of data that makes that solution infeasible.

c

[Ian Hillier]

I went through this same thing and decided it was better to make a backup, remove existing filesystems, down the whole thing, replace all the disks and restore. We had 200GB at the time. Doing one disk at a time and waiting for the rebuild can take 6-8 hours for each disk. If you have a loaded 7100, you're looking at 2 weeks (assuming you do one a day). Also, have a CE come out and upgrade your firmware at the same time. We decided the downtime was better than taking a chance on scrambling our data.