Questions on protecting boot disk for windows env.

[Jimmy Tom_2]

I need to provide redundancy for the internal boot disk for a rx8620 server running windows. I would like it to be similiar to how I can provide the mirroring feature like it is for the HP-UX using Mirror/UX and have the two boot disk on separate channels.

Can anyone suggest recommendations for this in the Windows env? Does I need a Raid card or any external raid disk, etc? How many I/O HBA do I need? Does Windows OS have mirror sw?

thx in advance.

[Ivan Ferreira]

Windows has the option to mirror the operating system by software. The best option is to use a hardware raid controller and enable raid by hardware, the problem with that is that you need to reinstall the os.

With software raid, you have some availability and you can do it without major changes.

To enable mirroring by software see:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302969/en-us

[kris rombauts]

Hi Jimmy,

for 64 bit W2K3 it is a bit more complex to setup software mirroring then on w2k/w2k3 32 bit, pls read the article below to understand why:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/814070/en-us


The preference goes out to using the SmartArray 5302 solution since that offers you a online hotswap disk replacement feature without downtime of the system if a disk fails.

By default the SCSI cabling is such that 2 channels are used in the RX8620 with SA5302 controller so you have channel protection also.

You also have numerous monitoring tools and management agents that make the usage and constsnt monitoring of the disks and controller much more flexible compared to software mirroring, i think it is worth the investment. As i mentioned, disk failure recovery is easy compared to software mirroring, even disk capacity extension is possible if you migrate to higher capacity disks later on, this is not really possible with software mirroring.


HTH

Kris

[Jimmy Tom_2]

Kris,

What about protection for the SA5302 controller? Is that a single point of failure? Can I use two SA5302 controllers to help?

thx

[kris rombauts]

Jimmy,

no their is no hardware raid possible between two cards, this would bring you back to a s/w mirror solution of two raid0 disks ..... expensive and nothing different then the embedded SCSI controllers situation.

Those cards however save their raid configuration information in their NVRAM and on each hard disk, so if a card needs to be replaced, the raid config gets automatically imported in the new controller and your set to go, but i agree this card would then be a single point of failure, you are correct about that.


Kris