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September 6th, 2013 11:00
Windows Spanned Volumes
Hello All,
I have a two part question that works around a physical windows sever with spanned volumes. Instead of doing LUN migrations, etc. the drive was increased within windows using dynamic disks and spanned volumes. All the disks in the volume are presented from a CX4. So the server has 4 LUN's that make up 1 volume within windows.
So part 1 is the physical server is being upgraded to new hardware but they currently want to keep the same storage for now. The server is currently 2003 and the new will be 2008. Will re-pointing the LUN's to the new server work correctly when the disk is initialized? IE will the new server see it was a spanned volume and put it back together. As or right now we don't have enough space to copy/migrate the data so were really looking at a re-point but the spanned volumes concern me.
And part 2 is moving the data. Within the next few months we should be purchasing a new array to consolidate our CX4 and VNX onto a single VMAX. If that happens has anyone worked on a situation like this. I don't want to SAN copy all 4 LUN's to the new array and be stuck with these spanned volumes. Once the application grows I will have keep dealing with them. I think this would have to be done on the windows side with robo copy, double take, or another coy based tool to move the data to a clean volume. Being spanned volumes I would assume the array based migration techniques would be out of the picture.
Any insight on this situation would be great, thanks!
dynamox
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September 6th, 2013 11:00
i've successfully imported dynamic partitions from win2k3-->win2k8 and win2k8-->win2k8 boxes. Once LUNs are presented to win2k8 box, you will need to go into Disk Administrator and bring them online and them import them. Importing one of the members will automatically import the other two.
This would be a good opportunity to get out of spanned disk/dynamic drive business. SAN based tools won't work, I don't think PowerPath Migration Enabler will work either (do double check the admin guide). I would bite the bullet and robocopy it over (crank up number of threads robocopy /mt:XX)
vogie563
14 Posts
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September 6th, 2013 11:00
Thanks for the info, you are confirming my suspicions. I am going to test the cut over with some blank LUN's and create a new spanned volume. It sounds like the metadata or whatever is in the partition so it will put all the prices together. It's not within windows itself.
I thought most of the array tools are 1:1 for LUN so yeah I thought I would be SOL there. We will probably do the robo copy when we have the new array, we currently don't have enough free space on either of our arrays to do it now and wont be adding on to them with a new array probably on the way.