VA7400 - Balancing in on for last three weeks

[G.G.krishnamoorthy]

Recently one disk failed in VA7400 disk array. After rebuiding, it started balancing. This is going on for last three weeks.

Array is heavily used even in night.

Is there a way I can findout how much percentage of balancing has completed.

Is it advisable to replace defective disk at this stage.

Best Regards,

Krishna

[Thayanidhi]

Hi Krish,
May be the unused space left on VA is very low! Is it in autoraid or Raid1+0? How many RG's configured?

Just a thought
Regds
TT

[Uwe Zessin]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought a VA7400 always has 2 RGs. RG1 takes all disk drives in odd-numbered slots, RG2 takes the others.

[Torsten.]

Hi Krisna,

yes, the VA7400 has two RG. If a disk fails, the array will do a "rebuild". If the rebuild is finished, you may replace the disk.

But the array will do "balancing" every time when it *think* this is needed. It is "spreading" the data across the disks - normal process. If there is a lot of data written, balancing is frequently needed. So the array decides to do a balance.

HTH!

[Shameer.V.A]

Yes VA7400 has two RGs. If one disk failed in the array, it will do a rebuild of array so that the array will come to stable state with less space on "used space for redundancy" area of purticular RG.

After replacing the disk, it will start spreading the data to the new disk. This will take time depends on your array size (3.2TB array having 1.6TB RG with 230GB configured for redundancy space will normally take 36-72 hours for rebuilding the data to new hdd).

During this time array status will be in "Balancing mode".

After completing the balanicng it should come to "Optimizing" or "None" in "Operataions in Progress" Area of armdsp -a output.

Regards,

Shameer