Migration of servers

[CA1248225]

Hi,

We are currently looking at purchasing two DL380G4s. One will be quite a critical machine, the other, not so.

If the critical machine were to experience a hardware failure of some sort, can anyone confirm whether it's as simple as it sounds to just swap all hard drives between the two servers, and bring up the critical machine on the secondary hardware?

[Sandeep H Raman]

Hello Joshua,

If the smart array controllers are the same,then yes its just a matter of disk swap.
One important thing to remeber, the disks must be in the same order.

Server A Bay 0 to Server B Bay 0 ...

SRH

[Kedd Guyton · Accepted solution]

Two issues come to mind even if you buy both DL380 G4's with identical configuration:

1) Before inserting the disks from the critical server into the non-critical server, make certain to clear the configuration (no logical drives) on the non-critical server's Smart Array 6i controller.

2) If the critical server's NIC is using static IP addressing, 'ghosted' devices will be a problem. Review the following:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=241257
Delete the 'ghosted' (non-present Plug and Play) NIC devices, reboot, and assign the same static IP address to the 'new' NIC.

As a best practice be sure to keep the firmware the same on both DL380 G4's.

[CA1248225]

Hi Kedd,

I was sure there'd be more to it, your discussion confirms the issues I was suspicious of.