Adding Node to HP P4500 G2

[smaganti]

Hi,

  Currently in our SAN we are having two Management Groups  with 2-Nodes of P4500 G2 on each management Group and FOM for each management Group.One management Group is used as Storage for 2008 Hyper-v Cluster and other Mangement Group is used as Storage for 2012 Hyper-v Cluster.We have moved all the VM's from 2008 Hyper-v Cluster so there are no VM's running on them.We want to format those two nodes in 2008 management group and add them to 2012 Management Group so that we have more storage capacity in 2012 management Group..

    Could you please let me know the best way to acheive this and any procedures and best practices to follow as we will be adding these to the live environment.Please list me the steps to follow or any resource available

   Please let me know if you need any further information

[oikjn]

if there is really nothing on the old management group, you can simply delete the group.  Then the nodes will show as available and then you can add them to the new group.  Just keep in mind that unless the four nodes are identical, you will want to at least keep the new nodes in a seporate cluster than the other nodes.  

Side note:  there was no real reason why you should have had two managment groups anyway and you should/could have had them set as two clusters in the same management group from the beginning and then admin is simpler and you only need one FOM.

[smaganti]

there is nothing on the old management group.Does deleting the mangament Group deletes the Data in the nodes..? or do i need to follow another procedure to delete the data before i add the nodes to the 2012 management group..? Four Nodes are identical interms of Hardware and interms of software all o them have the same version but two nodes are having two extra patches..Does this cause an issue..?

[oikjn]

removing the nodes will make the data less accessible.  If you are talking about top secret data on something that is going to an external source then its not safe enough, but if you are talking about all internal moves and nobody is going to actually try to recover the data, then you can consider it gone just like if you take a group of drives in a raid group and delete the partitions on it.  

you can simply delete the unused management group and then join the nodes to the remaining managment group and they are going to appear as brand new nodes to the new group.  At that point you can bring them up to the same patch level as the rest of the group and do what you want with them.  You can either make a new cluster and keep them performance isolated from the existing cluster or you can join those two to the existing cluster and increase its size/capacity after it completes a restrip.  If you go with adding them to the existing cluster, you need to keep in mind that it will IMMEDIATELY start a restrip of the nodes so you will want to do this during off hours or make sure you control the rebuild rate.