Move SAN partition formatted with ext3 from on server to another

[BR70551]

Hi @all

It maybe a trivial question:

I want to move a SAN filesystem (EVA P6500) from from a server to another one.

OS : SUSE SLES 11

The filesystem contains a RAID 1mirror (see below),  is not LVM managed and formatted as ext3

---- Output of cat /proc/mdstat

md4 : active raid1 dm-5[0] dm-14[1]
      31455164 blocks super 1.0 [2/2] [UU]
      bitmap: 2/240 pages [8KB], 64KB chunk

----

Now I will get a new machine which should replace the old one.

I know,

1. umount disk on the old system

2. present SAN Vdisk to the new system

But I´m do not know how to import the disk on the new system without formatting (and loosing data :-) )

Which is the best practice to move SAN filesystem to the other machine?

Thanks in advance

Franziska

[Matti_Kurkela · Accepted solution]

Your /proc/mdstat output indicates that the RAID1 mirror set is built up on top of two device-mapper devices, dm-5 and dm-14. Those might be basically anything: I'm guessing they are probably multipath devices, but they also might be encrypted devices or other more complicated setups.

> The filesystem contains a RAID 1mirror

Normally the filesystem may _be contained in_ a RAID1 mirror set. Having a RAID1 set _inside a filesystem_ (i.e. multiple disk image files) would be highly unusual, although it is certainly doable in Linux. This might have been just a poorly-worded phrase from you, but it makes me *really* want to verify everything before giving you any suggestions.

The first step is to ensure we understand the entirety of the existing set-up from the filesystem level down to the individual /dev/sd* devices.

Please run this command as root, and post the output:

dmsetup ls --tree

 (If the output is long, redirect it to a .txt file and attach the file to this thread.)

[BR70551]

Okay

But now it is too late... :-) 

At the last weekend I just did the ugly way to move the content of the affected filesystem from one to the other machine (backup & restore).

But thank you for your replay.