SmartArray 3200 - Breaking/Expanding

[Brian Hall_3]

I'm doing some work for a non-profit with old hardware and no budget.
Among other problems, their Exchange server is low on disk space. It's a DL380 runing W2K with a SmartArray 3200 and 2 18GB disks, mirrored, with two volumes (boot (4GB) and data (the rest)).
Both volumes (boot and data) need to be expanded.

Looks like there are two options:

Break the mirror, add a drive or two, expand the RAID to RAID 5 on 3 or 4 drives, expand the data volume using ACU and diskpart and move things to it from the boot volume. Probably not much help.

or

Back up both volumes, start over with a RAID 5, restore both volumes.

How do I:

Break the mirror for the first option?

Back up the volumes and restore? One of the other servers does have a DLT, and I have access to a NetApps box with plenty of disk space. I know (or think, anyway) Ghost doesn't work with servers; what are the other options?

Note that the array accelerator on the 3200 is dead; I'm also going to have to replace it or replace the 3200 (I have two 3200s on the way).

Thanks,

Brian

[Brian_Murdoch · Accepted solution]

Brian,

You could boot from a network boot floppy on the DL380, map a drive to the Netapps server and use Ghost to save the images to the network (Ghost does work with servers as it's only interested in INT13 BIOS devices).

You could then remove the original drives and install 2 X 72Gb disks (If these are large enough), create a new mirror using the Array Configuration Utility (ACU) and restore the images to the new mirror with the network boot floppy, changing the preferred sizes with ghost for the restore.

This way, if anything goes wrong you still have the original drives, untouched and they can be put back as they were without any problems.

The lack of the cache accelerator (write-back cache) will affect the write performance of the image copies as each will be forced into write-through mode instead. This will dramatically increase the time taken due to only having read cache.

Fix the Smart Array 3200 first, get write-back cache enabled on it and then perform the disk upgrades. A network boot floppy won't be difficult to create and there are some ready-built solutions available free if needed.

I hope this helps.

Brian

[Brian Hall_3]

Brian:
Thanks; now to find a DOS version of Ghost. ;)


Brian