Swapping both RAID1 Drivers Between Servers

[TonyCondon]

I have two Proloant DL360 Gen9 servers with identical hardware configurations including SmartArray P440ar controllers and two hard drives in ea server as RAID1 arrays.  Both are production terminal servers in a farm, Windows Server 2016.  In the interest of determining if an issue is hardware or software, is it possible to physically swap the hard drives between the two servers, or will the array controllers lose their mind if different drives suddenly appear?  I've had experience from way back with RAID5 arrays on HP servers and it caused a problem.  TIA.

[Jimmy Vance]

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@TonyCondon wrote:

I have two Proloant DL360 Gen9 servers with identical hardware configurations including SmartArray P440ar controllers and two hard drives in ea server as RAID1 arrays.  Both are production terminal servers in a farm, Windows Server 2016.  In the interest of determining if an issue is hardware or software, is it possible to physically swap the hard drives between the two servers, or will the array controllers lose their mind if different drives suddenly appear?  I've had experience from way back with RAID5 arrays on HP servers and it caused a problem.  TIA.

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"Drive roaming" is supported on HPE Smart Array controllers and has been for years. The array informastion is stored on each drive in the array, it is not stored in the controller.  The only caveat to swapping drives around is the controller firmware must be the same version or newer.  A new twist since UEFI was added into the mix is the boot entries are normally lost and will need to be re-created manually when moving drives around 

[TonyCondon]

Thanks, that sounds encouraging.  When you say the boot entries are normally lost and must be recreated manually, how is that it done?

[Jimmy Vance · Accepted solution]

I couln't find the customer advisory on this topic, but this covers the procedure https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c05087992

[TonyCondon]

Thanks Jimmy!