Adding local disk to RP5470

[James Drummey]

I have an RP5470 with 2 local Seagate drives in
the A0-A1 bays that are used in vg00 for the OS.

I'd like to add a third drive in one of the B slots without stopping the system. ( There is not currently one there. )

The User Guide says that Hot-Pluggables can be removed/replaced while the system is powered up, but then says a shutdown should be performed before drives can be removed/replaced. It's not clear whether this pertains only to replacing a drive that is part of an existing vg.

Do I need to shut the system down to add a new drive or can I slide in the new drive while it's up?

[Torsten. · Accepted solution]

Hi James,

you can install the new drive online.
Just insert it and run "ioscan -fn".

You should see the new drive now without any device files. Now use "insf" to create them.

I'm not really sure why the manual suggest to do a shutdown in order to swap a disk, but I swapped many, many disks on that kind of server while the system was running without any problems.

Finally it is up to you.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

The manual is correct.

I did this many times on my rp5450 systems in the US.

Never once had to do a reboot.

Once had to rebuild vg00 because there were not enough PE's to play with, but this is perfectly safe.

You will get an lbolt in syslog.log if you pull an active drive out.

SEP

[Adam W.]

insert new drive, ioscan it, then insf it. There should be no reason to shutdown the system. They should be hot swappable. No worries.

[Ganesan R]

Hi,

That is the feature of HOT-Swap technology. If the slot is hot pluggable we can insert the drive while the server is running.

As long as you have insf command to create device files for new identified devices no need to reboot the server. Rebooting the server is alternate to create device files.

[James Drummey]

Thanks for your answers.