removing SAS drives from rx3600

[Francis Noël]

Hello HP Forums

Got a rx3600 with a full complement of SAS drives running 11.31.

The system has recently been hooked up to the SAN and I have pvmove'd all the extents from the local disks to the SAN LUNs.

The VGs have been reduced and the SAS drives have been pvremove'd.

I need to yank the now unused SAS drives out of the server in order to redeploy them elsewhere.

I have found copious amounts of documentation on how to add or replace SAS drives but none of it covers the subject of permanent removal.

2.5 questions :

Do I just pull the drives out or is there a way to inform sasd of what is about to happen and have it de-activate the drives before I pull them ?

It also seems that the OS will remember the Unique IDs it had assigned those drives. Would it be a good idea to clear that info in case one of these drives finds its way back to this machine in the future ? How is that done ?

Thanks for reading !

[Tim Nelson]

These are just my thoughts as I have not had reason to do this.

use sasmgr to remove/delete all drives from configurations.

physically remove drives

rmsf the device files relating to these drives.

[Francis Noël]

Thank you for your input Tim.

All the drives are pretty much just *there*. No RAID groups, spares or anything to unconfigure as far as I can tell.

[Sandy Chen]

Hi Francis,

The disks are hot plugs. Meaning once you are confirmed that the disks are no longer used, you can just plug them out of the box. A reminder is that you should fill in the empty slot.

About the unique ID, take a look at the documentation on the link below, sasmgr reset will do a complete re-initialization, I'm not sure what is the effect, but could be the one you looking for.

http://docs.hp.com/en/J6369-90071/ch04s03.html

Regards,
Sandy

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

There is no performance difference if the drives are there and idle and present or absent.

The drives have moving parts and are better off running than not running.

SEP

[Francis Noël]

Thank you for your responses.

I'll pull the drives and see how the controller reacts. If it marks anything as "dead" or "missing" I'll see about unconfiguring/rmsf'ing. I WILL put blanks in the empty slots as the hardware guides are admant that it is required for proper cooling.

Steven : Good point but the drives are needed elsewhere, otherwise I would have left them where they are.

I'll post the outcome and my observations so stay tuned.

[Francis Noël]

The drives have been pulled and here are my observations.

The SAS controlled and the sasd driver picked up the changes immediately, but did not produce any logs. "sasmgr get_info" showed the drives were gone. At first I was a bit surprised at the absence of any logs/alerts.

ioscan registered the drives in the NO_HW state.

rmsf -H was successfully used to remove the device nodes.

I had to do extra clean-up with rmsf since it seems each internal bay on the rx3600 has its own target address on the bus.

After a few minutes EMS kicked in. Entries were made to syslog and mails were sent to root from the disk_em monitor. Those messages stopped once I had removed the special files/targets.

Front panel LEDs stayed green all the time and nothing was logged in the GSP's System Log facility.

I'll have a deeper look at the sasmrg doc to see if the persistent info for the removed drives can ben cleared without breaking the remaining config but practically I believe I'll manage the eventual reinsertion of a known drive on this host when/if the situation arises.

Screen dumps have been attached for your viewing pleasure. Thread closure and points later today.

Thanks for reading, comments are appreciated as always.

[Francis Noël]

thread over