VA7400 changing hot spare mode.

[Tom Hall]

Hi, we've got a VA7400 with 15 x 36Gb disks. Its hot spare mode was set to "Automatic", meaning that is set aside 2 disks worth of capacity per redundancy group for "Active Hot Spare" usage. in our case this meant 66Gb per redundancy group.

As this seemed like overkill for our purposes I changed it to "Largest Disk" in command view, but commandview still shows the same amount of space set aside for "Active spare" (66Gb per redundancy group). Surely this should be 33Gb per redundancy group if the setting has been changed correctly?

Do I need to do anything else to make this setting take effect, or can it not be changed once there are active LUNS on the array?

One other question, can you change from Raid 1+0 to autoraid whilst there is live data on the array, or do you need to remove all the luns first?

many thanks
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tom

[James A. Donovan]

Changing to AutoRAID should be simple, and should take effect immediately. Going the other direction is more dificult.

Try using the command line utility armmgr to make the changes.

To modify the active spare:

# armmgr -h LargestDisk

To modify the RAID level:

# armmgr -C HPAutoRAID

The armdsp utility will show you the configuration of your VA7400.

# armdsp -a

[Peter Mattei]

Just a word of caution!

While you can concurrently switch from Raid0/1 to AutoRaid you can not reverse this.
Going from AutoRaid to Raid0/1 means backup, reformation of the array and restore!

Cheers
Peter

[Tom Hall]

Thanks for the tips guys. The thing is I've changed the Hot spare level to "largest disk" (using command view). Now if I run armdsp it correctly reports:

Hot Spare = Largest Disk.

But when I go into command view its still showing 66Gb assigned to Active spare for both redundancy groups. So whilst it says its changed to "Largest Disk", the amount of disk space reserved for the active hot space is still that of "2x Largest Disk".

Any ideas
thanks
--
tom

[James A. Donovan]

Try re-running armdiscover. It may be that the database is out of synch with reality.

[Tom Hall]

Reran armdiscover. Then ran armdsp again and its still reporting 66Gb used for Active Hot spare per redundancy group, and that the Hot Spare = Largest Disk.

thanks
--
tom