Migrate MSA 1000 to another MSA 1000 and retaining existing logical drives

[HP_Newbies]

Hi

Is there a fastest and effiicient way of migrating a MSA 1000 to another MSA 1000? All settings (ie arrays and raid 1+Spare) will remain the same. Can I just power off the MSA 1000 and shift all the disks to another MSA 1000 and power it on? Will my data be gone? The location of all the hdds will remain the same.

Thanks in advance.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hi, I haven't actually tried this. But what I did and worked was to install an OS on a RAID1 in an older ProLiant DL380. Powered off, moved the disks to the MSA1000 and then the RAID was seen there. I could then boot from SAN with it :)

It should work fine on the other MSA1000 as the RAID configuration is stored on the disks.
In addition to what you wrote I'd make sure that firmwares are identical.

[John Kufrovich]

Yes you can migrate your drives.

When making changes like this, Please power off the array before swapping drives.

Also, If the old first MSA1000 is running 4.xx FW or less and the second MSA is running 5.xx/7.xx.  You will not be able to migrate those drives back to the first unit.   Each drive, we store meta data (aka RIS).  We made a slight change to the structure in 5.xx/7.xx, old 4.xx fw will not recognise the change.  So, consider it a one way trip.

[HP_Newbies]

Thanks for the information. Actually I am not sure which hardware is faulty. The situation is like that.

I have 6 disks (RAID 1 + 0)  and have 5 logical arrays. The 2nd logical array is having the status as 'ready for rebuild' . However, there's no action in the rebuilding after waiting for few days. That's why I am thinking to just off the msa and shift it to another msa without swapping the location of the harddisk (while retaining the logical arrays)

Another issue is because it's configured as mirrored hot-spare, can I check whether will the spare kicks in when any of the harddisk goes down? If the spare is able to kick in, instead of changing msa, I might want to wait til I get budget to upgrade the msa (no operation impact).