MSA1500 Setup Question

[Gary Glick]

Howdy all,
We're going to be connecting an MSA1500 along with 2xMSA30's to a Windows server. So far so good. Here's the rub, 1 of those MSA-30's is currently attached to the Windows Server and is in use. Can that MSA be attached to the 1500 and integrated in without losing the data that's stored on it? There's about 250GB of data on the MSA currently. I will certainly cut a backup of the data before doing anything, but if I'm going to have to do a restore I was wanting to include that in my planning.

I don't have a lot of experience with the MSA line and wasn't sure how it would handle this circumstance.

Thanks in advance.

Gary

[Khairy]

hi gary,

if i get you right, is one of the msa30 is currently connected to wintel svr via raid adapter?

And you want to use this msa30 with all the disks and attached them to MSA1500? If you do, then the answer is YES.

Data loss in msa30? Yes.

Make a full backup of what you have in msa30 before attach them to msa1500.

When you complete with that, start configure you msa1500 via ACU (you can reach there from the start menu-yeah,its GUI thing).

I assume you've installed ACU. You can download this or get it from a CD which comes with MSA1500. From there navigate the window and check whether the newly attached MSA30 with the disks are detected.

If they do, then perform raid configuration as you desire. During this exercise, disk content will be initialised. Assign Luns to it and its pretty straight forward. Go to disk management and run rescan. You should see some unformatted disk appears. If they don't, then reboot your wintel server so that i could detect the new LUNs.

Rgds

[Patrick Terlisten · Accepted solution]

Hello Gary,

if the MSA30 is currently connected to a Smart Array Controller you can attach it to the MSA1500cs without data loss. HP call this "DAS-2-SAN migration" and it's supported for disks and MSA enclosures.

But the enclosure must be attached to a Smart Array. If it's connected to another RAID Controller, you will lose you data, cause the Controller in the MSA1500cs can't read the meta data of the non-Smart Array controller.

Best regards,
Patrick

PS: It's better to take a backup before. ;) I've done this migration many times without problems.

[Khairy]

hi gary,

my apology.

Patrick is right. You can migrate whatever you have in MSA30 which connect to raid controllers to MSA1x00 without data loss.

Pls refer the following whitepaper about migrating to MSA1x00.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=c00032061&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=377751

Rgds

[Gary Glick]

The MSA-30 is connected to a Smart Array 5i controller, so I appear to be in luck. I'll go through the migration doc and see what it says.
I'll, of course, run a full backup of the data before attempting the transition.

Thank you for your assistance.

Gary