Upgrade Compaq Proliant 6000 from NT 4.0 sp6a to Windows 2000

[Luis_58]

I have a Proliant 6000 with 8 physical drives and 4 logical drives. I mirror all the drives. I had a theory of upgrading the box by shutting it down, removing the mirrored drives and then bring the box back up and upgrade it to Windows 2000. if everything went find, I would reinstall the mirrored drives at a later date. If the upgrade did not work, I would shut down the box disconnect the primary drives and reinstall the mirrored drives. I assume the box would be back up under NT 4.0 with minimal downtime. Then at a later date I would install the primary drives and have the Proliant server sync up the drives. Does anybody have a opinion on doing the upgrade with this approach? How does the Proliant tell the drives that they are out of sync? Is their some date/time stamp? Any feedback would be appreciated!

[Doug Eaton_1]

I usually don't work with mirrored drives, but what you are proposing sounds risky, you should make sure you have a GOOD BACKUP BEFORE you begin unless you can afford to loose all your data. Also you would be operating with no data redundancy until you reinstalled the mirrored drives, and if one the the mirrored drives you set aside as a recovery tool is defective, or gets dropped, you are in trouble, likewise if the W2K drive failed during the remirrror process.

The easiest way would be to obtain some additional drives, and not risk your mirrored sets at all, if you're doing this on the Pentium Pro 200 version on the 6000, I'll guess money is an issue and new drives are probably out of the question. Do you need to upgrade more than the OS mirrored set? My guess is also that removing a drive from each mirrored set is going to generate a failure message, so you would probably need to unmirror the drives first, and I'm not sure what would happen when you put the (secondary?)mirrored drive back in place of the (primary?) drive, since the controller and drives likely know which one is which.

I would suggest that you evaluate your future disk space requirements, since you're going to be rebuilding the box, this is the time to make any needed changes, I would also look to switching at least your data volumes to raid 5 arrays, this gives you more usable space while maintaining redundancy, you can addtionally assign a single drive as an on-line spare that would be available for all the other arrays you have setup, providing the drives are the same size and on the same physical controller (seperate channels are allowed). Was there a specific reason for having 4 mirrored volumes?, are they on seperate channels?, how many drive cages do you have installed, the 6000 will hold 3 cages? Are all your drives the same size/speed? Do you run applications that like seperate arrays on seperate channels, like SQL or Exchange?

My 6000 has 3 drive cages, the first cage is attached to channel 1 of the first array controller, cage 2 is connected to channel 2 of the first array contoller, and cage 3 is attached to channel 1 of the second arrray controller. Cages 1 and 2 each have 4-9.1 GB 1.6" drives, three of the drives in the first cage make up the first raid 5 array(OS), the 4th drive is a on-line spare for the first and second array. All 4 drives in the second cage make up the second raid 5 array(logs), the 3rd cage contains 6-18.2GB drives, 5 of which make up the 3rd raid 5 array(data0, the 6th drive is an online spare for the 3rd array only. I could not have used just 1 on-line spare in this case, spares must be physically connected to the same controller as the array they serve, and I have 2 sizes of drives.

If seperate channels are not required by your applications, my preference, especially for mirrored drives, is to place one drive on the first channel and the other drive on the second channel, in your case that would mean that your first cage had drive 0 of mirrored arrays 1,2,3,& 4 and the second cage hade drive 1 of array 1,2,3,& 4

doug...

[Luis_58]

My attention is to upgrade to Windows 2000 with easiest recovery option. I figured by disconnecting all the mirrored drives, I can upgrade the primary drives to Windows 2000 and then reinsert the secondary drives back in once the upgrade is complete and working. I will of course have full tape backups. All the mirrored drives are the same size and type on the different channels only the OS drives is on the same cage and channels. You know these days that nobody wants to spend any money.