Moving RAID to another Proliant DL 380 G6 with smart array 410i and SAS 146Gb 10K

[Cross_UA]

Dear Sirs,

Could you clarify, is it possible to move RAID (i mean to move hard drives physically) to another identical server?

In my situation I have one enterprise server and one identical backup server in another building. In case of some disaster I want to pull my hard drives from enterprise server, put them into backup server and start working immediately. But in such situation ACU of the backup server do not recognize unfamiliar drives. 

And one more situation. I have RAID 1 and 3 drives. Two of them are working as RAID 1 and one is stored in safe place. Periodically I swap backup hard with one of the RAID drives to have an actual version of the mirror drive in my safe place. So the question is how to restore my RAID from the backup drive in case of some disaster and both drives that were in RAID have destroyed.

[Jimmy Vance]

Please do tell how you managed to get a RAID 1 configuration on 3 disks

[Alex Geroulaitis]

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In my situation I have one enterprise server and one identical backup server in another building. In case of some disaster I want to pull my hard drives from enterprise server, put them into backup server and start working immediately. But in such situation ACU of the backup server do not recognize unfamiliar drives. 

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Nearly all RAID controllers have a function "scan drives" (for existing RAID sets) that will recognize and import existing, well, RAID sets.  I don't remember the exact procedure with the ACU - but it's there.

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And one more situation. I have RAID 1 and 3 drives. Two of them are working as RAID 1 and one is stored in safe place. Periodically I swap backup hard with one of the RAID drives to have an actual version of the mirror drive in my safe place. So the question is how to restore my RAID from the backup drive in case of some disaster and both drives that were in RAID have destroyed.

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Not sure I get the question.  Just plug in the backup drive and you are set to go?

[Alex Geroulaitis]

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@Jimmy Vance wrote:

Please do tell how you managed to get a RAID 1 configuration on 3 disks

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The OP did describe the procedure (of rotating RAID1 slices), plus you could always assign local spares.

[Johan Guldmyr]

The RAID configuration is stored both on the smart array controllers and on the disk drives.
When you put disks with a raid configuration on them in another server and boot this other server you will get a question during boot what you want to do.

[Cross_UA]

Thanks all for your responses.

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@alex Geroulaitis wrote:

Nearly all RAID controllers have a function "scan drives" (for existing RAID sets) that will recognize and import existing, well, RAID sets.  I don't remember the exact procedure with the ACU - but it's there.

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Hm. I didn't find any "scan drives" function for RAID in the ACU. The system marks such drives as "wrong" and I couldn't do anything with them except deleting and recreating raid (and I lost all data).

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Not sure I get the question.  Just plug in the backup drive and you are set to go?

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There is the same thing with backup drive. It is marked as wrong drive in raid and I could not do anything except delete and recreate raid.

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@Johan Guldmyr wrote:
The RAID configuration is stored both on the smart array controllers and on the disk drives.
When you put disks with a raid configuration on them in another server and boot this other server you will get a question during boot what you want to do.

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Hm. I did not see any messages from the system. My server cant find boot sector and try to reboot cyclically.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Are you moving all the disks in the array and putting them in the same hdd bays?

[Cross_UA]

No. First, because it doesn't solve all my problems. I need to restore raid1 from one backup drive.
Besides, all the situation makes me uncertain and full of doubts. I have alredy lost some data so I dont want to pull out both mirror drives.

[Jimmy Vance]

I misread the RAID 1 w/hot spare in the original post

Before you "pull a disk" for backup, are you shutting the system down? If not you likely to have corrupt data on the disk removed while the system is running.

I routinely break and re-mirror RAID 1 configurations as your attempting to do, but I don't have a hot spare in the mix. HP actually hasa document on the procedure.

RAID 1(+0): breaking mirrors and rebuilding drives 

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00378986/c00378986.pdf

The RAID information is stored on each disk in an area known as "RIS" You can move the disks as a group or in pieces from one system to another. It's best to put the disks in the same postion they were removed from, but if not,  the controller will normally recognise the disks have been shuffled around and print a message it's aware the order has changed and it's updating the information.

Make sure both Smart Array controllers are at the same firmware level. If the system your moving the drives to has older firmware there is a chance the array will not be recognized

[Cross_UA]

2Jimmy Vance

Thank you very much for reply. Your link was very useful. So as I understand if I put a mirror disk to another identical server and there are no RAID arrays were created on it, a raid controller should recreate RAID array according to the information from RIS area of the drive? According to my experience when I connect the drive to the RAID controller the drive is marked as unassigned drive. All I can is to create a new RAID array but I will lose all data on it. That question is very important to me: how can I get the information from the backup mirror drive if there are no information about arrays in the RAID controller?