MSA 2012FC power off during expansion

[Kevin Stout]

Hi All,

I am currently expanding a vdisk, which looks like it will take about 50 days total.

The building landlord is going to shut off the power for the weekend in a few weeks. Can I power the MSA off while an expansion job is running, without losing data?

Alternatively, is there anyway I can speed up the expansion? I could theoretically stop all IO for a weekend (4 esxi servers, with about 40 virtual machines) can I somehow understand how much this might help?

Thanks!
Kevin

[Trygve Henriksen]

If you can shut down the servers for a weekend...

Why not just backup the Vdisk(verify the data), scratch the whole durn thing and receate it, then restore data?

[Kevin Stout]

I am looking into doing that as well, I have a P2000 G3 on order anyway, which I may use just to do that.

Our backup system is currently 2 LTO 2's which with the 4-5TB's of data, data transfer rates start to look ugly, even with a full weekend.

my current estimate for expansion to complete is 28 days, the power outage is in 26 days... :(

An addtional complication, a drive has failed in the array, and the rebuild can't start until expansion completes. My backups are vm guest based as well, (e.g. client backs up the guest from the guest os) so restoring the entire array of 40 VM's could take me many days.