Does leveling have to finish before regaining drive failure protection?

[lwarner8]

Hi,

We have an EVA8100 that I replaced a bad drive in.  The disk group is setup for single drive failure protection which is currently not available.  Is it because the disk group is in a leveling pending status?  There is currently another disk group leveling.  I checked the occupancy of the disk I replaced and it is at 0%.  This is the first time this has occurred after a drive replacement and I am wondering at a technical level what it is doing??  Thanks!

[Torsten.]

After the other diskgroup has finished leveling, the system will level this diskgroup. Then you should see an increasing occupancy value.

[lwarner8]

Thanks for the reply Torsten!  Will the drive failure protection return to single afterwards?  A different disk group has been leveling for days and the percentages have changed from 50% to 64% down to 61%  complete and it seems it will never finish.  I am worried if we have another drive failure in the disk group that is pending leveling and has no drive failure protection that there will be data loss.  I don't suppose there is any way to cancel leveling on the one disk group and force leveling on the other is there? Or if there is another drive failure will it utilize the replaced drive with zero occupancy?

[Torsten.]

How much space is available (%) per diskgroup?

[lwarner8]

Hi

Currently-

DG1 is 92% allocated- all 300GB drives-pending leveling-before drive failure had single drive failure protection-none now

DG2 is 90% allocated-combination of 500GB and 1 TB FATA drives- this is the one that will not finish leveling.  It went from 64% complete last night to 51% this morning-has single drive failure protection

DG3 is 71% allocated - all 600GB drives- not leveling - has single drive failure protection.

each disk group is 10TB +/-

When I came on site in December DG1 was 100% allocated so I added another 300GB drive and it went down to 97% and had single drive failure protection.  Since the failure and replacement of the 300GB drive in DG1 the allocation dropped to 92% and the drive I put in is still at 0% occupancy with no drive failure protection.  I am stumped.

Thanks!

[Greybeard]

Mixing disks of different capacity is a sure way to break an EVA disk group, the controllers will try to put an equal percentage of data on each disk, so a 1TB disk will get two writes for every single write to a 500GB disk, although sometimes this goes wrong and the disks end up with different percentages of data. If the EVA then reads one quorum disk it may see 83% then later it reads another disk and sees 88% so the levelling % changes in the display. Also sparing "should" be a multiple of the largest capacity disk in the group, so again mixing capacities will confuse things.