Changing from Raid 1 to Raid 5

[Cincinnati UNIX Team]

I have two servers that are connected to two disk arrays via SAN and need to change the the disks from Raid 1 to Raid 5? How difficult is this?

[Rich Wright]

You don't say what kind of disk arrays you have. They might have capabliities that will help.

Are boot disks involved?

How much data is involved?

How much down time is acceptable?

What tape drives are available?

Answers to these questions will determine the best plan an what the dificulty is.

[Cincinnati UNIX Team]

Actually, there is just one disk array (fc60) and there are 6 luns, each being aboout 36 gig that have a raid 1 setup that needs to be raid 5. We have an entire weekend of downtime. Let me know.

Thanks,

Jeff

[kris rombauts]

Hello Unix team,

on the Windows NT version of the firmware of the FC60 disk array their is a online posibility to migrate from RAID1 to RAID5 online wihtout downtime but obviously this means you need to add additional hard disks if that is an option. If not you could start to delete one volume/LUN and re-use those free disks to add them to the remaining volumes/LUNs which are still in raid1 at that time and migrate from their.

Just some ideas that came to mind, it all depends of course if you still need 6 Volumes/Luns in raid5 or not, if you do not plan to add new disks i think the whole idea here is to have more disk capacity available in the end.

Pls check the man pages or FC60 documentation
on Unix or consult the local HP support team to check for the automatic raid level migration on Unix.

regards, Kris

[Rich Wright]

If you boot from this array, and you have a large capacity tape drive, you could create an Ignite tape with everything. Then shut down, reconfig the array, then Ignite.

You can also Ignite from a network Ignite depot on a different server.

If no boot disk is involved, then you would need to backup the file systems on the array.
vgexport them.
reconfig the array.
ioscan & insf.
Then rebuild the volume group and restore.