Assistance with mirroring boot disk in 11.31 on blade server

[Karen Birkelbach]

I have a brand new BL870 with two SSD drives. I found the 11.31 LVM guide (http://docs.hp.com/en/5992-3385/ch03s04.html#cbddaicd) with instructions on mirroring, but I am getting different results from the idisk command than I expect. When I look at the disk that already has the OS on it, the partitions are in this order (condensed with " | grep Partition|grep :"):

Primary Partition Table (in 512 byte blocks):
Partition 1 (EFI):
Partition 2 (HP-UX):
Partition 3 (HPSP):
Alternate Partition Table (in 512 byte blocks):
Partition 1 (EFI):
Partition 2 (HP-UX):
Partition 3 (HPSP):

On the second disk, I've completed steps 1-4, but when I try to do the first mkboot in step 5, it tells me I must run the idisk command to create the EFI and HP-UX partitions. When I look at the idisk output for the second disk I see:

Primary Partition Table (in 512 byte blocks):
Partition 1 (HPSP):
Partition 2 (EFI):
Partition 3 (HP-UX):
Alternate Partition Table (in 512 byte blocks):
Partition 1 (HPSP):
Partition 2 (EFI):
Partition 3 (HP-UX):

As you can see, the partitions are in a different order. This is a raw installation of HP-UX 11 Version 3 (HPUX11i-VSE-OE B.11.31.0809). Any help is appreciated.

[Raj D.]

Karen,

From the scratch ,You can follow the steps from Page 81 :
http://docs.hp.com/en/5992-4589/5992-4589.pdf

Cheers,
Raj.

[Indrajit_1]

Hello!!

let me understand that; you are trying to add new disk and make it mirror disk.

please confirm.

[Torsten.]

If this is a brand new installation, consider this:

- create a hardware RAID
- cold install the OS

You will be happy about this decision once you need to replace a failed drive :-)

[Michal Kapalka (mikap)]

hi,

one question, if its a blade there is a HW raid, why should you make a SW raid on the OS level if its possible to do it on HW level.

mikap

[Karen Birkelbach]

Thank you all.

Raj, that document has been removed and replaced with the September 2009 version.

Indrajit, the blade came with two drives and I want to mirror onto the second disk.

Torsten and Michal, the reason I want to mirror the disks is to speed up installation of another blade. These are our first blade servers and we're new at this. I'm having issues with the blades not seeing the ignite server and the OS was installed for us on one blade. I want to mirror the drives, break the mirror and move the second disk to the second blade to bring it up. If this is a bad idea, let me know. I've been running Integrity servers for a while now, but not in the blade form.

Thanks again,

Karen

[Michal Kapalka (mikap) · Accepted solution]

hi,

you could use DRD for cloning of disk,

but in my opinion, i will always prefer HW raid configuration instead of SW raid.


mikap

[Torsten.]

I would do the following:

- create a clone of the running OS with DRD

- prepare the hardware RAID on the next blade

- insert the cloned disk and boot from

- clone it to the mirrored disks

- put the clone disk into the next blade ...

[Karen Birkelbach]

Thank you, Torsten and Michal! I've had the 11.31 class and completely forgot about DRD. I will check that out next.