Swap Raid 5 disks from one server to another - DL360 G3

[Michael Matthias]

Greetings,
We need to upgrade our Production server from 4*36Gig drives to 4*72Gig drives.
We have a Dev server too.

Is it safe to do the following?: (particularly step 7)
1) Remove the 4 drives from our Dev server.
2) Insert the 4 new 72gig drives into the Dev server.
3) Build the new drives into a raid 5 array with a C: (for windows 2000 system) and D: (for data).
4) Ghost the C: from Prod to Dev
5) Copy the D: from Prod to Dev
6) Remove the old 36gig drives from Prod
7) ****Transfer the newly copied 72gig drives from Dev to Prod.
8) Return the original drives to Dev.

We are concerned that step 7 may not work.
We wonder if the production server will think of them as blank disks and re-build the array as a new blank disk.

Thanks in anticipation.
Mike

[KarloChacon]

hi Michael

For me sounds good all steps but I want to know
and I know why you are worried about step 7 YES the most important

Dev and Prod are both dl360 G3?
both have the same controller?

basically I want to know that

regards

[Michael Matthias]

Hi Karlo,
We bought both machines at the same time to the same specs, so that's good.
(I made a typo in my original message... they are DL380 G3s, but that shouldn't matter).

Anyway, it looks good and we will go ahead next weekend with our fingers crossed :-)

[KarloChacon · Accepted solution]

hi

yes that good if both have same HW just this before doing that procedure check that both controllers have the same firmware I mean the same version to avoid any issue

if Dev the one your going to use to create that RAID 5 has same firmware version to Dev.

if you have any doubt about this let me know

regards

[Joshua Small_2]

Will it work? Probably, but why are you doing it the long way around?

This is a Smartarray 6i right? It supports online expansion. Just pull one drive and replace it with a bigger one, one at a time, (let it rebuild inbetween) and you can expand your RAID5 array on your production server while you're running it.

[TarunJain]

Hi Mike,

Joshua is giving a risky option.
As the time of expansion the server could not sustain a failure of any disk.
He is talking about changing a disk at a time then waiting for rebuilding & repeating this Six times.
It would take a lot of time & the server would be at risk while expansion.

So stick on to ur original plan.

Regards,

Tarun Jain