DL380 G4 - Using RAID for backup

[Brian W Green]

I have a situation where I am planning to upgrade some DL380 servers. There are 6 hard drives in each - a RAID 1 array of drives 0 & 1, and RAID 5 for drives 2,3,4 and 5. The OS is on the RAID 1 drive.

What I would like to do is break the mirror, upgrade the server, then re-establish the mirror when everything is done. If something fails, use the 2nd drive of the mirror to boot from, reverting back to the pre-upgrade config, then restore the mirror before trying again. But, as the RAID Controller in the DL380 tracks drive serial numbers, I am unsure as to how this is done.

Can anyone give some help here on how to do this (if I can)?

Thanks,

Brian

[Tony Berry]

Aboslutely this can be done... I just did this on 30+ DL380 systems. We have the same setup... 2 drives in RAID1 and 4 drives RAID5. We upgraded from RedHat Linux EL2.1/3 to EL4. We pulled drive 1 (leaving drive 0 in place), powered up the system, upgraded Linux, ran for a day or so to make sure everything was working, then pushed drive 1 back in. We left drive 1 sitting in the bay for cooling purposes. HP recommends not leaving a bay open. We left the RAID5 container alone... didn't unplug or move any of those drives.

Some notes: when you boot up with only drive 0 in place, the RAID controller will complain. Just ignore the message and let it boot, or you can hit either F1 or F2 to continue.

We had a little more of a project due to the way we did it (cloning one EL4 system to all 30 system) that I'd be glad to share the process with you if desired. If you have a "lot" of systems to upgrade, this is the way to do it. The DL380 was chosen because of its ability to pull RAID configuration from disk OR controller EEPROM.

[Tony Berry]

Brian, I just happened to have a need to clone one of our DL380's just now, so I made special notice of what happens in your proposed scenario. Here's what I did:

1) Log into system (Linux) and ran 'shutdown -y -r now'
2) During memory check, I pulled drive 0 out completely and drive 1 out a 1/2" and replaced drive 0 with the "source" DL380 drive 0.
3) When the system got to the controller initialization, it complained that drive 1 needed to be replaced to maintain "RAID 1 Redundancy". No keys to press.
4) I booted the system into single user, changed some network settings, and rebooted.
5) Came up fine and in a couple days I'll slide drive 1 back in and let it rebuild from drive 0.