Migrating scsi controller

[Koutsogiannakis George]

We 've been using some Proliant DL380 G3 alongside with Redhat Linux. We want to increase performance so we have purchased a couple of 641 controllers and enablers. The question is one:
Can the new controller use the disks (that happen to be RAID-1 mirrored) immediatelly? Downtime means money lost and we need the fastest way to do it.

[Derek Parmenter]

Hi,

What is the original controller your disks are currently connected to ?

Derek

[Koutsogiannakis George]

The original controller was the matherboard integrated 5i.

[Derek Parmenter · Accepted solution]

In theory from a hardware perspective you need just to put the RAID controller in and the disks should automatically configure the 641 (obviously changing over the cable). I am not aware of the implications for Linux as I don't know Linux, sorry maybe someone else can advise of this.
A word of warning I have, is do not try and reconfigure the RAID on the 641 through ACU or ORCA as this will delete the existing information. The 641 should be auto-configured by reading the RAID data from the disks.
Afterwards, you will need to make sure the 5i is not giving errors because of the missing RAID set.
.
Obviously I suggest that you have a known good backup etc. in case anything goes wrong.

[Koutsogiannakis George]

Thanks for the answer...

We are going to try that and I will post the results when we are done.

[Koutsogiannakis George]

Hello again.

Here are the steps we took:
We shutdown the machine and removed one of the
drives from the raid1 array .We then changed the controller (Of course on the next boot the system warned us about the failure of one of the drives) and then did a operating system upgrade(to redhat 9). We successfully boot up and the system works great now.
However, when we try to reinsert the second disk back to the array the machine doesnt seems to start rebuilding the raid array. We rebooted the system and entered the controller setup utility. The logical drive states that it is in INTERIM RECOVERY mode. The system doesn't seen to find the second physical drive. We tried removing and reinserting the drive many times. When we insert the drive, one of the lights blinks a few times and then nothing, the disk seems dead or else not used. What can we do to be sure the system is using the second disk?
Thanks in advanced.

[John Marinov]

No if the controller says it's in interim recovery mode, then it hasn't accepted the disk.

Look at the Insight Manager disk details, specifically the error statistics. You should see something. Such as "timeout errors".

The trick will be to cause the array controller to re-start the recovery process. One of the ways we've done it is to reboot the server. Or you could try replacing the lost mirror with a fresh disk.

[Koutsogiannakis George]

We tried rebooting the server but it didn't help. Disks seems dead (his lights are off).

We inserted the disk into another server DL380 with the 5i controller and it recongnized it as s 36GB instead of 72GB. We erased all data , created a new raid 0 and inserted the disk back tbut nothing. Took it back to the other server and erased the raid 0 data (still the server recognized it as a 36GB disk) and again back to original machine. Still nothing. We are starting to think that this disk is damaged in some way...

Ideas anyone?

[Derek Parmenter]

The only thing that I can think of is that the BIOS on either the disk or the RAID controller needs updating. I would probably look at the disk and try updating that.

Derek