ESXi Host dead, need to replace two orphaned VSA with replacements with minimal restripes.

[chadw_1]

The situation. One management group, 2 clusters, two VSA's per cluster network mirrored with a seperate failover manager on a third VMware host. One of our VMware hosts that housed two of the VSA's has died, fortunately the mirror did it's job and the clusters remain up but with "missing" VSA's.

I have rebuild the host and created two new VSA's with intention of adding them to their respective clusters so they can restripe. They are currently sitting uniassigned to any clusters in the management group and the two orphaned (long gone now) VSA's still show with red X's in the cluster alongside their still working partners.

I understand that I can remove the missing VSA's and the volume will restripe, and then I can add the new ones to the cluster which will again restripe. Is there a way to just slide these two new VSA's in place of the dead ones using the swap or exchange commands so I can do one restripe instead of two? I don't see anything in the documentation about the best way to proceed. I have an incident with HP support but they seem to taking their time calling me back which is wonderful considering how much the support costs.

Version 9.0

[Jess1313 · Accepted solution]

Hi, 

Yes you can exchange the systems to prevent having to do 2 restripes per cluster. 

What you will want to do is while the VSA's are outside of the group patch them to match your existing VSA's specs (you may have to use advanced mode to do this [Help > preferences > upgrades > advanced]), once they are patched, add them to the existing groups and situate your sites and managers. Once that is completed right click on your cluster, highlight over edit and a sub-menu will popup select Exchange. Once the Exchange window pops up select the dead VSA, and then click exchange, it will pormpt you to select the VSA you want to exchange in, select the one that is appropraite for the cluster, then click ok. 

This will change the positions of the VSA's to the new VSA in the clsuter, and the dead one outside. Once the volumes show completed restriping you can remove the dead ones from the group and it will disappear. 

If you have any complications... call support. 

[chadw_1]

Perfect! Thank you! Fortunately I had the same patch levels on the replacement VSA systems. Re-stripe in progress!