Upgrading an rp5450 to HPUX 11.23

[Galen Benson]

Good Afternoon All,

We're getting ready to upgrade an rp5450 (L2000) server from hpux 11.00 to hpux 11.23 & realize that we need to replace our 2 internal 18Gb drives with 36Gb drives to handle the new operating system. We're debating however whether we should get 2 of them & mirror them or 3 & set them up as RAID5. We don't know though whether the onboard controllers will support RAID5. Anyone out there who could help me figure this out?

Thanks in advance for your help,
Galen

[Torsten.]

For the very unlikely case you have an RAID4si controller installed, you can setup a hardware RAID 5 or mirror on the internal drives.

If you just have the standard normal scsi controllers, you should mirror 2 drives with LVM.


Be aware some HBAs supported in 11.00 are no longer supported with 11.23 (e.g. HVD SCSI).

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Galen:

You will be performing a cold-install since you can't go directly from 11.0 to 11.23.

I would use LVM and MirrorDisk/UX for your operating system (vg00). Add a third physical drive and implement DRD (Dynamic Root Disk) to clone a system image to an inactive disk for software maintenance and recovery.

If you are interested in RAID-5, see the VXVM Migrration and Administration manuals.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Galen Benson]

Thanks for the advice so far, but I'm still not sure whether or not our onboard controller will support more then 2 drives. How do I find out what the onboard controller is & what it's capabilities are?

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

The rp54xx series did not come with a RAID controller by default. The internal disks are essentially JBOD. These servers have slots for 4 disks.

The easiest way would be to just mirror 2 drives. I would try to do RAID on this server.

[TTr]

> whether or not our onboard controller will support more then 2 drives.

There are two onboard controllers. If you look on the labes right over the 4 internal drives their hardware paths are

0/0/2/0.0 0/0/2/0.2

0/0/1/1.0 0/0/1/1.2

So the the two top drives are on controller /2/0 and the two bottom drives are on /1/1. Ideally to perfectly balance the I/O you should set up mirrored pairs and ENSURE that for each pair, the first member is the top drive and the second member is the bottom drive. This way the I/O for the pair is separated on the two controllers. You can set up to two mirrored pairs this way.

I have several L2000 and L3000 and I use one internal pair for the OS and the other for apps. data goes on external storage.

[Galen Benson]

Thanks all for so kindly sharing your wisdom with this newbie.

[Torsten.]

There was a RAID controller sold as an option in the past for tis server family.

For this reason the firmware enabled even the slot 3 for L1000 systems.

But the "normal default" config was a direct connection to the internal SCSI controllers.

As mentioned above, the 4 internal drives are sharing the 2 internal busses.

The upper 2 disks are on one bus, the lower on another.

You should mirror each upper disk to the lower ...

[Galen Benson]

All answers pointed me in the right direction. Thanks.

[TTr]

Do you have any PCI adapters installed on this server? Some of them are not supported under 11.23. They are only supported up to 11.11. If you have some, check them out.