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Re: Hot swap with online spare

 
scott_417
Frequent Advisor

Hot swap with online spare

Take DL380 as an example, with the total of 6 hard drive disks. I put

a)Disks 1 and 2 (with 72 GB each) in Array One with the RAID 1 implemented,

b)Disks 3 to 5 (with 146 GB each) in Array Two with RAID 5,

c) Disk 6 (with 146 GB) as online spare

1)Now, if Disk 1 in Array One is crashed, will the system (Array One) automatically rebuild Disk 6 and treated it as if it were the crashed disk 1?

2)Next I'll take the Disk 1 out and got it repaired. Now the Disk 1 is workable again. If I put this disk into the original drive bay, will the system automatically rebuild this disk? If so, after the rebuilding, will the system (Array One) automatically "retire" the Disk 6 and resume it to its original online spare mode (ready for future failed disk)?

3)After some time, suppose the Disk 3 in Array Two is crashed, if the answers to above 1) and 2) is YES, I'll assume the system will rebuild the Disk 6 and treated it as if it were Disk 3 in Array Two, correct? If so, remember that the Disk 6 came from the last hot swapping, it may now carries some "old" data, in this case, while rebuilding the Disk 6, will the old data be totally wipped out, before the new data in Array Two is contructed on it?


Many thanks to help.

Scott
4 REPLIES 4
Steven Clementi
Honored Contributor

Re: Hot swap with online spare

Scott:

1. Yes, if you have set up this disk as an online spare. You can set a single disk to be the online spare for multiple arrays.

2. Not sure. I have never had a chance to actually play with that and test. If you don't have an answer by tomorrow, which I expect you will, I will run a fewscenarios at work on a test box and let you know.

I believe the drives automatically revert back. You re-insert the new drive, it rebuilds and your disk 6 becomes spare again. I could be mistaken or there could be some manual intervention to make this happen.

3.Yes, as long as it is an online spare. The old data should be wiped out beforehand since the array controller is placeing it into a different config with a different RAID level.


Steven
Steven Clementi
HP Master ASE, Storage, Servers, and Clustering
MCSE (NT 4.0, W2K, W2K3)
VCP (ESX2, Vi3, vSphere4, vSphere5, vSphere 6.x)
RHCE
NPP3 (Nutanix Platform Professional)
Mike Bollman_1
Respected Contributor

Re: Hot swap with online spare

1) So long as you configure Disk 6 to be an online spare for both Array's, the answer is yes it will auto-rebuild.

2) Yes, once you replace the failed drive with a new one the new drive will rebuild and the spare will become a spare again.

3) Yes, if disk 3 crashes the online spare (assuming it is not being used to replaced a failed drive in the first array) will come up as the active drive. Yes, the old data is wiped out and replaced with the partition/data information from the second array.
Prashant (I am Back)
Honored Contributor

Re: Hot swap with online spare

Hi Steven Clementi,

If you are able to replicate the same please mail me also about the test results on indianvb@gmail.com.

Even i am not sure about it bec never monitred it by my self.

Regards,
Prashant S.
Nothing is impossible
Prashant (I am Back)
Honored Contributor

Re: Hot swap with online spare

Hi,

Ans for Q2
"online spare configuration is restored when the failed drive is replaced. After the failed drive is replaced, the content of the online spare drive will be copied to the replaced drive. After the completion of disk copy, the online spare configuration is restored."

From the following Doccument.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00419664/c00419664.pdf

Reagrds,
Prashant S.
Nothing is impossible