DL380 G4 Raid 1+0 and Increasing Disk Size 1

[mikej97204]

I have a DL380 G4 with 6 36.4 scsi drives installed with a Smart Array 6i. The current setup is:

C:\ 34727mb with Raid 0
E:\ 86815mb with Raid 1+0

What I want to do is replace the 36.4g drives on the E: drive with the same number of 72g drives.

My questions are, can I increase the disk size of the E: drive without affecting the C: drive? Or do I need to swap the 36.4g drives used by C: as well?

If I can just swap the drives on the E: drive and since there is just data on the E: drive, I plan on restoring it from backup after I put in the new drives.

Now assuming I can just swap the E: drives, the quesiton is, is it the last 4 drives or the last 5 drives? I first figured that C: used up drives 0 and 1. But the space shown doesn't add up. If drive E: used 4 drives at 1+0, I would think that would be a total of 72 gigs and not 86.6 gigs. But if it was 5 drives, that would be about 90 gigs... which may be right since 86.6 gigs is closer to 90 than 72 gigs is closer to 86.6.

I looked at the HP Array Configuration Utility but it didn't tell me what drives are being used for which array. How can I be sure which drives are being used by C: and E:?

Is my thinking correct that I can swap out the E: disks and just restore the data back onto the larger drive? Or am I going to need to swap out all the drives and restore Windows 2000 server and then the data?

Thanks for any help on this.

Mike

 

[PaulGillespie]

I presume you mean you have a raid 1 on the C drive?

If thats the case then the other 4 drives are raid 10.

You need to identify which drives make up the E Volume. I don't know HP that well but with Dell you can go into the Array software and get the software to identify which drive is which by making a light on the drive flash. Does it give the serial numbers of the drives? You can check this way too.

Then remove the 4 drives and replace with bigger ones and restore from backup.

I'm sure you'll be backing up everything first anyway.

good luck.

 

[TigerfanLSU]

You should be able to go to the HP Array Config utility and there should be a check box that shows logicial versus physical. Then it will show you which drives are on which array.

I would guess C: is Disk 0 only, RAID 0 so that is 36GB total (not fault tolerant, very bad)
E: is Disk 1-5, RAID 1+0 (36.4 * 5)/2 = 91GB minus formatting, so about 87GB.

Since you have no physical room for expansion, I would backup your data on E:, pull the last 5 drives out and install bigger drives. Re-raid and restore data. Or even better, use Disk 1 to be your mirror of Disk 0, then replace the last 4 drives with the 72GB or bigger and re-raid.

 

[mikej97204]

Paul, no, when I go into the ACU utility it says Raid 0 and no mirroring for the C: drive. Drive E: is Raid 1+0 with mirroring.

I'm familiar with Dell's version as well, which is why I had to ask about the DL380. I'm going to assume that just physical disk 0 is Drive C: and that physical disks 1 - 6 are Drive E:. I'll do a full backup of the server, remove the 5 36.4 drives and reboot. If it boots up, then I'll know it was those five. If it doesn't reboot, I'll put in Drive 1 with Drive 0 and try it again.

After I determine what drives are E: array I'll put in the larger drives, make sure the array shows the additional disk space, format and restore the data.

Worse case (I hope) is that I end up putting all the original drives back in for awhile until I go to plan B.

Thanks.

Mike

 

[mikej97204]

Tigarfan, you and I were typing at the same time.

Yes, I was suprised to find the computer configured with Raid 0 for C: drive, although it was set up with only 4 drives originally. I had added two more 36.4 gig drives to the E: drive some months ago when it was getting low on space.

I probably will change drive 1 to mirror drive 0 since I'm going to be working on it anyway.

Thanks

Mike

 

[PaulGillespie]

RAID 0 is striping for performance and requires 2 disks. Sounds like you have no RAID on the C Drive then and not RAID 0. I didn't think you could have RAID 1+0 on 5 disks, i thought you would have a RAID 0 array of 2 disks then have those 2 disks mirrored by a RAID 1 array therefor giving performance and redundancy. Well i'm not sure what's going on but from the sounds of your plan you'll be ok.

Good luck!

 

[spi200]

Hi Mike

Should be no problem to replace the 34Gb drives with 72GB drives. I have done this a number of times with great success. Here is how.
Swap one 72 Gb drive each night until you have replaced all drives (4 or 5 it does not mater) - this allow plenty of timefor the controller to rebuild the data on the new drive. Once complete then using the HP ACU "Expand" the array which will allow the controller to take up the additional space which you have now installed (new drives). Follow this you then need to "Extend" the array into this new space - just take the defaults if you want the lot allocated.
Depending on your OS then you must take one more step for your OS to use this new space. NT4, WIN2000 and Win2003 are slightly different to each other and there are also after market products which can assist.
Here is a TID a wrote earlier this year which included changing the RAID levels.

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1248083&page=1

Netware has an online utility which works great called CPQONLINE - this resizes your RAID set and then you can simply extend your netware volume as you wish.

Two more tips - Take two good backups that you you will stand behind and take your time swapping the drives - always check the controller status and if it says its busy just let it do its thing and do not rush it. Some rebuilds can take a long time if not set to a high priority.

Good luck
David D.

 

[TheLad]

I have also used the procedure outlined by spi200 and would recommend it also. I also highly support the point about getting decent backups, just in case...

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[mikej97204]

I found out that when the server was set up, it was only given one raid array, so both C: drive at raid 0 and E: drive at raid 1+0 are on the same raid array. I should have checked that before I started using the server, but it was a spare and it just started getting used a little at a time for database testing and then a spare VPN server and then it worked it's way into getting used for more database work which started eating up disk space.

David, does the fact it's only one one raid array change your one disk at a time swap out? If not, I'll go ahead and give that a try. If it does, I'll go with my plan to backup everything, rebuild with 2 raid arrays and restore it.

Luckily it's not all that complicated since the only thing I'll really need to do is re-install SQL 2000 and then restore all the database data. This will probably be a good time to upgrade it to Win 2003 Server as well. Doing the rebuild and restore just means I have to find a time when I have to the time do it all at one setting and when our billing department isn't using the data that is in the database that is on there. Again, it's a good thing it's not production data, but where the billing people do their edits and creation of invoices.

Even if I don't use your solution on this one, I do have 2 other DL380's that have been in use for awhile that it will be perfect for.

Thanks a lot, David. And thanks for the info Paul. I didn't get the alert that you had left a message or I would have thanked you sooner. And thanks for your 2nd, Lad.

Mike

 

[mikej97204]

Well, I found out that if I leave drives 0 and 1 in the server, take out the other 4 and put in the bigger drives, the server won't boot up. So even though C: drive and E: drives are seperate, Windows 2000 won't boot up unless the last 4 original disks are installed. When I put them back in, the server booted back up normally.

This is telling me that the OS must be stripped onto at least 2 of the last four drives, even though I would think they are not part of the C: drive.

I was hoping it was going to be an easy swap the drives, expand with the ACU, restore and back up and back up and running. But we all know that we never get the easy path.

Mike

 

[blister911]

Mike,
Did you replace all four drives at one time? If so, go back and re-read the post by spi200. It should be one drive at a time and let the array completely recover before swapping out another one.
Good Luck.

 

[TheLad]

Agreed, you must follow the procedure to the letter unless you want to cause damage to the data on the server.

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