VA7400 -> how to extend active spare

[frey28]

Dear Guru's,

Currently i have 2 disk failed in my va7400. Due to this machine no longer under maintenance contract ( will be decom by end of the year ), how can i extend active spare in the storage?

below are the space configuration capacity for both redundancy group.

Redundancy group 1:

Total = 1.369 TB
Logical Drive = 865 GB
Unallocated = 182 GB
Redundancy = 219 GB
Active Spare = 133 GB

(1 disk failed from this group)

Redundancy group 2:

Total = 1.303 TB
Logical Drive = 868 GB
Unallocated = 121 GB
Redundancy = 211 GB
Active Spare = 133 GB

(1 disk failed from this group)

My questions are:

1) Can i extend the active spare size from above configuration capacity? Currently the hot spare configuration is set to automatic.

2) Is it safe to change the hot spare setting online? is there any bad possibility for the data lost in the VA, cause there are 2 DB servers are attached to this VA.

[hvhari]

When active hotspare configuration is set to automatic, it reserves size of two largest disks in the array which is the maximum possible. You can reduce it to single disk if the space crunch is too much. However it can impact rebuild time in case of failure. If current rebuild is finished, you can reduce the active hot spare capacity.

The best you can do this at this time, is to replace the failed disks as quickly as possible.

[Torsten.]

The system does not have a hotspare disk, but reserved space for hotspare across all disks - as long as possible.

[frey28]

Meaning, twolargestdisk configuration is the largest active spare size can be set in va7400? if i still got unused disk space, meaning i cannot simply increase the active spare size?

the reason i am doing this because i don't want to replace the faulty disk that cost me USD1000 per single disk. Some more this system is going to be decommission soon.

Do you have any ideas to maintain the va7400 beside replacing the faulty disk?

[hvhari · Accepted solution]

You can not increase hotspare allocation more than two disk space in the VA.

"Unallocated space" will be used during any disk failure to speed up rebuild. So, if you delete the LUNs and make extra space in "Unallocated space", it will help during any failure. This effectively means you use much less space in VA (the same is the result if you were able to increase hotspare capacity)

[Torsten.]

Once the rebuild has finished you have again the same space for hotspare - as long as there is enough space.

[frey28]

May i know what is redundancy space for?

[Torsten.]

"May i know what is redundancy space for?"


For redundancy?

This array can do either RAID1 or AUTORAID, this means newer data is in RAID1, older data is converted to RAID5 automatically.

[frey28]

meaning, redundancy space is RAID 1? for new data? can u help give me more details in that?

[Torsten.]

Can you post

# armdsp -a