MSA-2040 Pool removal

[NickEJWright]

Hi, we had a couple of drives fail on us at the same time (RAID-5), so we couldn't just replace the drives and repair the disk group (which is now quarantined). What I want to do is re-use the two working drives in a new disk-group and remove any reference to the defunct one.

When I remove the OK drives, I get the opportunity to remove 'Pool B' - it goes but then comes back, and as soon as I plug the two working drives back in, the disk-group reappears as quarantined and QTOF - i have tried every command to get rid of the disk-group but with no joy. The drives are showing as OK rather than LEFTOVR so I can't clean them either. I have already ensured that no attached devices are trying to access the Pool / Volume or Disk-Group. Disk-group is Virtual rather than Linear. Any suggestions?  Thanks

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1]

@NickEJWright 

Physical removal of drives will not fix your issue if you want to use those drives again in same system. Temporary physical removal not clearing VDG information which is stored in drive metadata.

In order to achive your objective which I understand you don't want to try recovering existing VDG of Pool B rather you want to clear VDG info from those drives and re-use them again. So in that case you try to delete the VDG so that all drives part of it will become AVAIL drives which is equivalent to new drives with no VDG info left in drive metadata. However the real challange will be it will try to drain out all existing volume data which was part of that VDG. Do you have any other VDG present in Pool B. If so how much space left in that VDG because when you try to delete the VDG VDRAIN will happen if sufficient space available in other VDG part of same pool B otherwise command will immediate fail with error.

For example, in order to remove VDG named dg1 you can try this command >> remove disk-groups dg1

After you delete existing VDG which is no longer required, make sure you replace all faulty drives before creating new VDG again or re-use those drives.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

I am an HPE employee

If you feel this was helpful please click the KUDOS! thumb below!

*******************************************************************

[NickEJWright]

Hi Subhajit

Thanks for this - I don't have another DG in Pool B, but I tried to create a new one and get the message that I cannot create the new diskgroup in a virtual pool that is offline!

Any further thoughts?

Thanks

Nick

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1]

@NickEJWright 

Now only option is to log a support case with HPE and our engineering team will follow special commands to delete this QTOF VDG and Pool B. These commands can't be shared in public forum.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

I am an HPE employee

If you feel this was helpful please click the KUDOS! thumb below!

*******************************************************************

[sudhirsingh]

Hi Nick,

Drive is holding back the Pool and disk-group information which can not be cleared easily.

It required some special privilege and commands to delete/remove the offline Virtual Pool and Disk-groups information which HPE Engineering can only do. 

Please raise a support case with HPE for further assistance.

Regards,

Sudhir