1TB Drives in NSM-160

[Nick Laurino]

We are wanting to take 3 of our NSM160's and use it to store VM's in our DR site and replace the current 500GB drives with 2TB drives.

I see that Damon has successfuly installed 1TB drives all at once without any issues, but would like to know what process he used.

Were these modules i a management group or was this done before they were added? I was told by LeftHand (prior to the HP buyout) that the SanIQ software would have to be reinstalled if all drives were replaced.

I currently have these units in there own management group and there is no data on them. I cannot see any way to format the drives in the management console so how is that done? If I replace all four drives in one module at a time will the full drive size be recognized?

I would appreciate any comments.

[Tim Smoot]

Gregory,

I think I can be pretty certain that upgrades on these units is not without its challenges! :-)

That being said, I jumped straight to the 2 TB (1.81 actual) drives on my old NSM160N's, and after fighting with SanIQ 8.5 for a while (see post above about the "O/S Partition"/etc.) I finally just gave up.

There is a firmware update for the RAID controller, and 3Ware/LSI is more than happy to provide it, as well as a flash upgrade for the motherboards for these units (They are SuperMicro Servers).

Honestly, I wanted to configure these as a replication SAN for the new P4000 Series SAN that I put in, so having them on anything other than SanIQ 8.5 would have rendered them useless in this plan.

However, there is good news, depending on what you consider good news! OpenFiler LOVES these systems, and it runs like a dream on them. Now you can't really get the "cluster" SAN like you can with LeftHand, but it does work. Flash the controller, the motherboard, install 2 TB drives, create the array and install OpenFiler (it will fit on the 256 MB Dom's already in the NSM160). If you wanted to get really creative/complex you could setup each OpenFiler module with a single iSCSI LUN, and attach multiple of these LUN's to a clustered Windows 2003/2008 server and make a fault tolerant array out of the iSCSI LUN's (I am sure you could do this with Linux as well, but not as familiar with that) and end up with about the same thing as LeftHand (minus some of the performance of course).

I ended up utilizing my VSA Licenses on top of something from VMWare (ESX/ESXi will NOT recognize the 3Ware controller out of the box, there is some talk about a custom driver, but I wasn't able to prove/disprove that) and it looks like I am going to be home free.

Hope this helps!

smooter

[Phil Haberek]

Hello,
I successfully replaced the 250gb drives in my NSM160's with 1.5TB drives, VERY easy with NO issues.

I upgraded the units to the 8.0 firmware, not 8.5. I could be wrong, but I thought the NSM160's weren't compatible with the 8.5 so I didn't even try.

The 8.0 upgrade went easily, as well as the installation of the 1.5TB drives.

I'm using mine for disk based backup storage. So far, working perfectly!

Hope that helps a little.
~Phil

[Damon Rapp]

You really don't want to upgrade the firmware of the motherboard or the 3ware controllers on the NSM160. If you do the motherboard, you will find that certain monitored values (like fan speed of the CPU and MB) are no longer correct. For the 3ware controller, the firmware is tied closely to the linux driver used.

When I upgraded the firmware on one of my NSM160, it became a little flaky. I believe it was due more to driver issues with the 3ware card then anything.

[Nick Laurino]

Damon,

We are wanting to take 3 of our NSM160's and use it to store VM's in our DR site and replace the current 500GB drives with 2TB drives.

I see that you have successfuly installed 1TB drives all at once without any issues, but would like to know how this was done.

Were these modules in a management group or was this done before they were added? I was told by LeftHand (prior to the HP buyout) that the SanIQ software would have to be reinstalled if all drives were replaced.

I currently have these units in there own management group and there is no data on them. I cannot see any way to format the drives in the management console so how is that done? If I replace all four drives in one module at a time will the full drive size be recognized?

Did you shuit down the node and just replace all drives?

One other question, Do you think upgrading from 8.0 to 8.5 is necessary?

I would appreciate any comments.

[Tim Smoot]

Upgrading to any version of SanIQ is dependent on what you want to do with it.

In my case, I want to use it as a Remote Copy, and as such my SanIQ version has to be at least , but could be greater than the version of the source SAN.

I have a brand new P4500 SAN, so I had to figure out how to make the NSM160N platform provide me with the ability to get to 8.5 of SanIQ. I jumped through the hoops, and I am doing the best option I came up with.

Thanks,

smooter

[Nick Laurino]

Tim,

I appreciate the comment, but my situation is a little different. I have 6 NSM 160's and we have removed all storage from them except for our Exhange and SQL data. I removed 3 of the 160's so we can place them in our DR site for Remote Copies. They are all on version 8.0 with all patches so are running the same version.

I already configured the 3 DR modules into a seperate management group and was getting ready to run remote snapshots to it when our IT director wanted me to look into replacing the current 500 GB drives with 2Tb drives.

I remember quite a while ago asking support about doing this with 1TB drives and was told we could, but it wasn't supported and if we did I would have to reinstall the San/IQ software. This was just after HP took over so when I came accross this post I was hopefull.

The only thing I am not understanding is how Derick or anyone did the replacement. Were the untits powered off and all drives replaced at once? If so did replication take place and did they have use of the full amount of storage?

The on-line documentation (Help in the CMC) indicates you must change the RAID to 0 and shut down 3 of the drives do the replacement then power off the last drive and replace.

I am interested in trying this, but thought I would check to see how it was already done before I experiment.

[Damon Rapp]

Nick,

The best way to upgrade the drives to a larger size is to remove the node from the management cluster and then turn it off. The swap out the 4 drive and turn it back on. When it comes up, you can then build the raid on the box.

Note that with 2 gig drives, rebuild takes quite some time.

[Tim Smoot]

I agree with Damon,

Just shut them down and replace the drives. The OS is on the DOM's, it isn't on the Array (although I heard this has changed in the new P4000 series units).

Just to be devils advocate, I would recommend getting a set of 2 TB drives and trying the process. I gotta be honest, I did, it fired up, I saw all of the new storage.....but then the O/S Partition, and Log Partition errors came up. Tried to join it to a management group, and create a LUN. No Go!

Again, that was on 8.5 though....hopefully you won't have that issue on 8.0 or below.

smooter

[Damon Rapp]

Isn't the OS and Log file system error related to upgrading to 8.5? I thought that for the NSM160 I saw a mention of that in the upgrade notes.

As stated the OS and log file systems are on the DOM flash and not on the hard drives. This is how this upgrade is possible without having to re-install from the CD.

Most of the Lefthand/HP nodes stores the OS on the hard drives. I think just the NSM150, 160 and 260 have the DOM flash modules. The rest store the software on the hard drives. They do store it differently though based on if they node does software raid or uses the Raid controller. LH dropped the software raid only devices a while ago though (I still have 6 NSM200s that use it though).

Thanks