How to replace 2 mirrored disks on rx4640

[Hicham EL HARTI]

Hello,

we have a rx4640 machine with 2 73GB hard disks. These hard disks are hardware mirrored with a PCI-X SmartArray 6402 RAID Controller.

We have an ignite server in use to restore the operationg system (vg00).

We would like to replace the 2 73GB HDs with 2 other 146GB disks.

Is it possible to do that without down time? I mean, can I replace one HD (the slave one) an put a 146GB disk, then migrate the OS and do the same with the other disk.

Thank you very much for any help

Best regards

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

No it is not possible to this without downtime.

How I'd approach it is like this:

1) Replace the disks one at a time, hot, without a rebuild, giving the system time to rebuild the raid, which will take several hours.

2) Then boot the system and go into start card raid configuration mode and see about expanding the raid volume, to make the space available.

The reason you have to boot and modify the raid configuration is that there size information in the system NVRAM and bios permanent memory for the smart card.

SEP

[Torsten.]

Do you really need such large disks for vg00?

IMHO this should be possible - don't know if this is a supported solution. If you replace your disk, the controller will mirror the drive to the new disk. After both disks are replaced, the logical drive has the same size. Now you can extend the drive using the
saconfig /dev/cissX -E -c
command (see http://docs.hp.com/en/J6369-90044/ch04s02.html#v1650880 ). If you want to use the new space, have a look at "man vgmodify". Be aware you can increase / ,/stand and swap only by using ignite backup/restore.
In any case I would recommend to take a backup.

[Hicham EL HARTI]

@Torsten,
yes we really need so big vg00. Strange but true;-)

@all
if a downtime is necessary, is it may be more faster if I make a net recovery (make_net_recovery), take both old disk out, put the new disks in the machine and then restore from ignite server?

Thanks!

[Torsten.]

It depends on the performance. I already took a backup on a FC connected tape in less than 10 min - but restoring a golden image via network in ~15min.