SureStore E 12H array question - Adding new drives

[Mike Keys]

I recently addes 4 new 36Gb drives to my 12H array. What I did is add one drive at a time, let the array verify the disk and then had to run the 'arraycfg -D -a ' command to add the drive to the array.

I did this four all four drives. Next, I was told by our support folks that I would need to down the DB and wait for a short amount of time so that they array would enter a rebuild. The Auto Rebuild parameter is set to yes and the Rebuild Priority parameter is set to high.

When I brought down the DB and I/O's ceased, the array went into "rebalancing" mode. I was then told by our support folks that I could bring the DB back up and that the array would continue to rebuild.

I did this and the array went back to a "ready" state.

We are in a rush to have these disks available to us and I was told to expect a 3 day rebuild window based on the size of disks.

So, the array is not rebalancing or rebuilding at the moment. What can I do now? How can I check to ensure that these disks are ready for use?

Thanks.

Mike Keys

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Do an arraydsp -d ArrayID and make sure that all disks are included. If so, you are ready to create new LUN's. It was really not necessary to down the DB as the balancing would have started automatically. It sounds as though you added additional drives rather than replacing existing smaller drives.

[Mike Keys]

Yes, I did add new drives. The drives are included. So, the "rebuilding" is only if I were replacing existing drives in a LUN. Then I would have to remove them one at a time, let the rebuild take place and put them in one at a time letting the rebuild take place.

Thanks.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Not precisely. It depends upon how much capacity was already used in your existing array (ie, how much space was actually allocated as LUN's). If you were already in RAID 1/0 mode because you had about 50% as unallocated space then very little or no balancing would be done. However, if almost all your previous capacity were allocated then a great deal of balancing would have been done.

By the way, you cannot expand existing LUN's all you can do is add additional LUN's -- up to 8.

[Mike Keys]

Before adding drives I had 94208MB allocated to LUNs (0 through 5). 52309MB were used for redundancy. I now have 96614MB unallocated (avilable for LUNs). My Active Hot spare size increased to the largest disk in the array, which is now the 36GB drive.

The rebalancing took maybe 5 minutes or less.

As far as RAID 0/1 my RAID 0/1 capacity is 19458MB.