Upgrade from DL380 G2 to DL380 G4?

[Saku Kimari]

Can I upgrade from DL380 G2 to DL380 G4, only whit changing harddisks from G2 to G4?

Is there some kind of problems to worry about?

Br,

Saku K

[Antonio Luiz de Oliveir]

Hi, you should not have problems.
Just don't forget to update the softpaq before the change. So you'll have all the drivers loaded.
Good Luck!

[Saku Kimari]

If I update softpag, in worst case can I go back to G2?

[Gus Kwong]

Hi Saku,

If you worry about potential problem, may be you can mirror the hard drive in the G2 and then take one of them to the G4?

Cheers,

[Steven Clementi]

Saku:

I almost remember the G2 being the high end P3 model or maybe a very low end P4. The G4 is a high end P4 Xeon with HT support.

Here is what I think may/can happen...

1. It just won't work because of chipsets and drivers and the major differences between the 2 models.

2. It will work, but only after you update the Support Paq, specifically the Smart Array controller driver.

3. You should continue to have multiprocessor support if your G2 has multiprocessors. If it does not, then you can enable Multiprocessor support once the system is up and running ans stable.


Ways to go about this....
best way to test would be to fail one of the drives (remove it from the G2) and place it into the G4 in the same location (if you pulled drive 1, make sure you insert back into drive 1 slot.) Boot the server with NO NIC connections.

If it boots up, then you can simply put a new drive in and have it rebuild (if you have a spare)(and assuming you have a mirrored array/RAID1 logical drive for your Boot/OS partition.

Putting the drives back into the G2 with the newer Support Paq should not cause any problems. In fact, you would probably benefit since the drivers would help on the G2 as well.

Steven

[Antonio Luiz de Oliveir]

We forgot to ask... what's the OS?

[Seek_2]

Steven: Why should the NICs be unplugged? Is there any particular reason apart from not having 2 identical machines on the network?

Also I have to warn Saku that I had no problems moving disks between the same generation models (from one G3 server to another - even with hardware differences), but I have a problem (BSOD) when moving disks from G4 to G3.

[John Dongworth]

You may get this to work but it depends on what your original boot controller was. If you used the onboard 5i on the G2 them you will not have the drivers available on the HDD for the 6i that is standard on the G4....Inaccesible boot device will be the result if running under NT/WIN2K/WIN2K3 and possibly all other OS's. If you had a separate Smart Array controller as your boot controller, and your transfer this along with the drives you will more than likely get it to work......

Good Luck ;)

[Steven Clementi]

Seek: That is the only reason I can think of... So the servers do not cause conflict with each other, if performing the change while the G2 is still in production.



Steven

[Mark Sherwin_1]

All of this moving Disks from server to server is fine but it can and will at times cause issues due to the old hardware ending up in a "Ghosted" state. By this I mean you can't see it via Device Manager but it's still there and can hold resources. eg. IP's etc.
There's a script which will bringup the Device manager in a State that displays all. After device manager has started you will need to select "view - Show hidden" Now you'll be able to see Ghost and hidden devices.
Tip leave the "NON PLUG and PLAY" are alone.