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Re: Raid 5 3 x 72GB Upgrade

 
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Peter Drummond
Occasional Advisor

Raid 5 3 x 72GB Upgrade

Proliant ML350 G3 with 641 array controller. I am intending on upgrading the current array of 3x U320 72GB (Win2K boot) to 3x U320 146GB drives. From reading information in the forums it would seem the only practicable way to do this is to start from scratch i.e. Smartstart CD - partition - install OS and finally restore the data from a tape backup. Is this the best way to do this? Would it be possible to Ghost the current boot partition (10Gb) to an image and then use one of the 72Gb drives as a single boot drive and the three 146Gb drives in a separate Raid 5 array?
13 REPLIES 13
Oleg Koroz
Honored Contributor

Re: Raid 5 3 x 72GB Upgrade

Verify if system at latest Updates, Firmware, Driver
Power Down Box
Pull one drive restart accept failed HDD and enable Automatic Recovery Slide new Drive in let it Rebuild and do same with second drive,... power off ...
After from ACU use unused space for your needs and from disk manager rest ..
Please have good backup
Peter Drummond
Occasional Advisor

Re: Raid 5 3 x 72GB Upgrade

That sounds like the solution I'm looking for. Just one question; why is this not possible with the machine powered on? Hot-swappable drives of the same size will rebuild on the fly.
Ed Cox
Respected Contributor
Solution

Re: Raid 5 3 x 72GB Upgrade

Peter,
I have done many "in-place" upgrades without having to power anything down.
Just make sure you have a backup just in case :) And if you keep the Array Rebuild Priority on a Low setting it shouldn't really affect the performance of the OS, just takes a little longer for the rebuild to finish if the server has OS activity to the drives.

Pull out the first drive and replace it with the larger drive. Open the Array config utility to get an idea of the % completed...(Logical drive - More information link- scroll down ..if I remember correctly).
Once that has completed (and it can drag on for quite a while)...repeat with the next drive.
The end result will be that your original Logical drive(s) will remain the same size but you will have a lot of "unused" disk space. At this point you can do a couple of different things:

1. Create a new Logical drive or drives.
2. Extend an existing logical drive (Win2k I think needs SP3 or higher for this).
3. Or a combination of the above.

If you extend an existing logical drive:

Once completed Windows Disk Manager will show unallocated space adjacent to the existing Win2K partition that corresponds to the Logical drive that was extended. So if you want that Win2k partition to take advantage of the new free space you have to use something like ServerMagic or HP's Virtual Replicator with Online Volume Growth or MAYBE Microsoft Diskpart (but that might be a Win 2003 thing).

Good luck
Ed Cox
Peter Drummond
Occasional Advisor

Re: Raid 5 3 x 72GB Upgrade

Ed,

Thanks very much for your extensive help. I have had a lot of success with Paragon Partition Pro with resizing partitions on Raid 5 arrays so I'll go with that once the rebuild has finished. As you say, the most important detail is to have a full reliable backup.
Oleg Koroz
Honored Contributor

Re: Raid 5 3 x 72GB Upgrade

....
I have done many "in-place" upgrades without having to power anything down ....

Peter along this is more easy, than powering down, DO NOT ACCEPT THAT RULE; AS A RULE OF THUMB, I saw how people crying when data lost more often when they do one the fly, just incase if something goes wrong you have more chances to get corruption on the RIS table mismatch├в ┬ж. Take your chase open any array controller user guide and read trough how to upgrade space
Ed Cox
Respected Contributor

Re: Raid 5 3 x 72GB Upgrade

Sorry Kov...
That is a safe rule to follow. I have worked with and taught countless service techs and ASE's for Compaq since 1991 on SystemPro servers, IDA and IDA-2 controllers, IDA expansion boxes and then all controllers with the Proliant servers since 1993. So there have been numerous situations in which server storage systems were upgraded in this fashion.
With the combination of RAID and the SMART family of controllers it's very safe to do the in place upgrade as I listed above. It would not even be a good business practice to have to constantly bring production servers up and down just to swap out a hard drive. Kind of defeats the purpose of Hot Swap.
It follows the same principle as having a drive fail and an online spare kick in...or swapping out a failed drive for a new drive.
While HP always errs on the side of caution, check out page 2 of this HP document.
ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/servers/proliantstorage/drives-enclosures/hp_hard_drive_replacement.pdf

So if you have SIM or access to the System Management Homepage you can scope out the overall drive health (pre-failure type info) prior to doing a swap out. The array controllers also indicate "Imminent Drive Failure" during POST and the Amber LED on a drive will now flash on and off in the event a pre-failure condition exists.
Cheers,
Ed
Peter Drummond
Occasional Advisor

Re: Raid 5 3 x 72GB Upgrade

I have upgraded the drives to 146Gb by rebuilding one at a time. This all works O.K, but now I cannot access the disk management option in computer management. I have tried to install the latest HP Support Pack but that fails. It is like nothing has changed, the only place I can see the additional free space is in the HP Array Config utility.The RAID 5 compatible partition manager I use just shows the drives as they were with no additional free space. Is there something I have to do during boot?
Ed Cox
Respected Contributor

Re: Raid 5 3 x 72GB Upgrade

Peter,
Once the upgrade completed, did you see additional free space in the Array Config utility? If so...you now have the option to "Extend" your existing logical drives so that the new free space can be seen by your OS.
Make sure you have a current backup before doing this extension.
I'm assuming your OS is on Logical Drive 1. You can highlight that in the ACU and there will be an Extend Logical drive option on the right. Once you have chosen that you can dictate how much of the free space you want to allocate to LD 1. After choosing some or all of the free space, the extension process works somewhat similarly to the expansion process...(and it takes awhile too). You can check your progress by clicking on LD 1 and there is a More Information link to the right. Under there at the bottom will be a percentage complete status bar.
After this process completes, check and see if you can get back under the Disk Manager applet.
Ed
Peter Drummond
Occasional Advisor

Re: Raid 5 3 x 72GB Upgrade

Hi Ed,

Thanks for your help. The expansion process began at 46 percent and after 60 hours is now at 49 percent. This is to expand from 136GB to 261GB. Do you think it's normal to be this slow? In the event log there is a repeated entry for disk performance indicators not being available since the process started.