Replace P400 raid card with P800

[Mike UK]

Hi,
I have a DL380 G5 with a P400 RAID card.

If I replace the P400 with a P800 will all my disks work exactly as before and all the data will be preserved or will I have to reconfigure the disk arrays and reinstall everything ?

many thanks for your help

Mike

[Gary Antonio Benavides_1 · Accepted solution]

Yes, you can do it.. The HP Smart Array Controllers supports Drive Roaming. The RAID information is stored in the drives and not in the controller, so moving the disks to another server will not result in data lost.

Smart Array Controllers will detect an existing array in the drives and then they will start communicating each other. Array Roaming.

Array roaming allows the administrators the ability to move a completely raid set to another system without losing RAID configuration and data on that raid set. If a server fails to work, the raid set disk drives can be moved to another server.

Drive roaming

HP Smart Array Controllers support drive roaming, which allows administrators to move hard drives and arrays while maintaining data availability.

Drive Roaming allows administrators to move one or more hard drives that are members of a configured logical drive to a different bay position as long as the new bay position is accessible by the same controller. In addition, it allows administrators to move a complete array from one controller to another, even if controllers are in different servers.

When attempting to move drives between servers please follow some basic rules to retain the data on the drives.

There must be a RAID created on the drives.

Swapping of drives must NOT be done in hot plug.

If the RAID array to be moved contains the OS there should not be any other RAID array in the destination array controller.

This is because the bootable array will always be the array "A" and if you have an array already in the controller the new array will be tagged as array "B" and if you need to boot from it the array "B" it will not be possible until it's marked as array "A", even though that does not mean that the data will be lost.

For proper OS functionality the destination server should be another just like the source, this to avoid BSOD and other app. issues, however if it's only data there would be no problem at all.

[Mike UK]

When I spoke to the HP technical people on the phone they told me I would have to rebuild the array! I wondered if it was possible and I glad to find out that it is

Many thanks for your help

[T.Daniels]

Don't know if you've tried it already, but I've done this twice in the last six month and it went without a hitch. Just make sure your P800 has the same (or newer) firmware as the P400 has.

[TTr]

This guy also did a similar thing today. He replaced an E200 by another E200.

[Broken link removed on March 31 2017 by Mod]

I can't find it right now but HP has a statement on their web site about how all SA controllers are using the same disk configuration architecture and you could migrate the disks from one array controller to another without loss of data.

[Viveki]

Hi Mike,

I doubt you can do it. You can move from one P400 to another fo sure. But moving to P800 is risky.

Please ensure a backup before you start. Please update us the result as well.

[Mike UK]

Hi

thanks to everyone for your replies.
I installed the new card and swapped the drives over and it worked perfectly.
It booted up no problem and kept the exact same configuration and retained all the data

Mike