Migration of operating system to a larger disk

[I Hawley]

Hi Guys,

I’ve recently gotten hold of a BL60p Itanium Blade and have installed 11.23. The problem is that the disks that came with it are 36GB, which doesn’t allow us to configure the right amount of swap. We’ve ordered some 72GB ones to replace them and what I want to do is:

Put a 72GB drive in the second slot
Backup from the 36 to the 72, but resize the partitions so that I have a much larger primary swap
Replace the 36 in the first slot with a 72 and mirror back

I have installed Ignite on the system and am looking to probably use make_net_recovery to backup to the second disk but am unsure of the procedure and switches I need to use.
Can I backup to the second disk and resize at the same time? Or am I going to have to backup over the network to another system and restore back to my second disk? (I have a newly installed rx7420 on the same subnet)
Or is there a better way of doing this?

By the way, I don’t have a tape drive accessible to this system.

Thanks in advance,

Ian.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

If you are applying the old 2X-3X swap rules, those are almost certainly decades out of dates. I have many servers in use now that run much less swap than memory and perform flawlessly. That is what the swapmem_on kernel tunable does. It allows you to treat 75% of memory as process reservation space. Any box that actually needs 2X swap space is going to perform terribly. Normally a 36GiB boot drive is vastly more than sufficient. If you must do this the the safest method is a make_net_recovery and then install the larger drive. That way, if anything fails, you simply put the old drice back in and all is well.

[I Hawley]

Thanks.

I know what you are saying and in general I size systems with just enough to cover the memory. This particular one is for SAP and the end customer insists (curse them!)

Ian

[I Hawley]

Do I need to make_net_recovery out to a second system and then back again?

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Yes, that is the least evil method. Have you considered that not all the swap needs to be primary swap? You could easily set the swap up on another disk --- and since it really isn't going to even be used (assumming you have enough memory), it can even be that dreadful, slow, never-to-be-used, filesystem swap space at low priority.

[I Hawley]

Well, they've already bought the 72's, so they will want to put them in, but i'll put it to them.

So, I need to install Ignite on the 7420.
I use make_net_recovery to create the archive on the 7420 and then can I simply use make_net_recovery -i on the bl60p to restore the archive to the second disk?

cheers,

Ian