Hot spare or not ??

[PotterJon]

Hi,

A contractor recently installed a HP Proliant DL380P server as a VMware host.  We purchased 6 x 600GB drives and we asked the technician to setup 5 of the drives in a Raid5 array and to setup the sixth as a hot spare.

The VMware host shows the available size as being consistent with 5 x 600GB drives in a RAID5 array but the activity light on the sixth drive is flashing?  The hot spare drives in our other HP servers dont flash?

Unfortunately, I cant switch the server off and access the management interface to check the config because we cant afford the downtime and contacting the technician it is not an option.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[Suman_1978]

Hi,

Which Led on the drive is flashing?

Check this document, it will help.

Thank You!
I am a HP employee.

[PotterJon]

Thanks for the reply Suman,

The 'hot spare' (Pic1) drive shows:

• Activity ring is spinning
• Hard drive status indicator is solid green

Is this correct for a harddrive configured as a hot spare? My other 2 HP servers have hot spare drives but there are zero lights showing (Pic2) on the hot spare drives, could they be configured incorrectly?

Thanks again for the help.

[Torsten.]

How does the configuration look like if you inspect from ILO (storage tab)?

[Suman_1978]

Hi,

Hot spare hard disk drives' activity ring indicator on Gen8 servers should be normally off.

If its working then it could be due to some firmware issue of that particular drive.

Take a look at this document.  Do check the drive model number and see if it requires a firmware update.

To check the drive model number, its printed on the drive itself or by running array diagnostic utility, check the report.

I guess even you are not sure if that drive is actually a Spare or configured as an active drive in the array.

Thank You!
I am a HP employee.

[PotterJon]

Thanks,

They are not the drives described in the document so i can only assume i have no hot spare and the drive is an active part of the array.

One last question, what are the benifts with a dedicated hot spare over removing a failing drive and inserting a replacement in its place?

[Torsten.]

Did you check from ILO?

The benefit is it starts rebuilding immediately after the drive has failed.

[PotterJon]

Hi Torsten,

The server is a VMWare host, there is no array/storage management tools and we dont have ILO configured on this server. 

[Torsten.]

Plug in a network cable for the ILO, it will do DHCP.

You can see the storage configuration from there.

Credentials are on the tag attached to the server.

[PotterJon]

Am i correct in thinking you have to purchase a liscense to use ILO?

If so, we cant use it unfortunately.

[Torsten.]

You need the license for use virtual media and remote desktop, but all the information features and much more are always available.

It will look like this:

[PotterJon]

Thanks,

I will configure ILO and check.

Once again, thanks for your help.