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October 29th, 2009 05:00
Need to move data on AX150i
Hello everyone and please bear with me as I have never attempted to do this before. Currently I have one AX150i with the original 4 drives installed. The techs set everything up so that four servers connected to the SAN and each have data on just the first four drives. I have since installed all remaining drives in the chassis and would like (need) to move the data off of the first four drives onto the second set of four drives. Can anyone help me get through this. Also, I forgot to mention that Drive 11 is my Hot Spare. The new drives are just that, new with no LUNs setup or anything. A complete outage is possible in the near future and I am hoping to get the procedure down before attempting this.
Dev Mgr
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October 29th, 2009 11:00
A few questions that will play a role in the answers:
- are you on the latest flare for the AX150i? (02.20.150.5.026 per EMC) -> if not plan on upgrading to this
- do you plan to move the data from all virtual disks to the new disks, or just move 1 or 2 virtual disks (or the data on them) to virtual disks on the new drives?
- indirectly related: if you were/are planning to move the data from all virtual disks to the new harddrives, what are you plans with the first 4 drives (these contain the OS for the storage system, so you can't just remove them or so)?
A somewhat-walkthrough based on the available info:
Assumptions:
- you're moving all data off of the first 4 drives
- you won't be using the first 4 drives for anything anymore (but won't be removing them as that would turn your SAN array into a doorstop)
- all 4 physical servers that are using storage on the array are running Windows (2003/2008) with Powerpath 4.5.x, 5.1.x, 5.2.x or 5.3.x.
- you have validated and tested backups of all your data
Suggested steps:
- create a new diskpool on the new drives and select the raid type you want to use
- create new virtual disks on this pool (at least 1 virtual disk for each server (servers CANNOT share a single virtual disk, unless you cluster the servers (and even then only 1 server at a time gets to access that disk))
- assign each virtual disk to the server it is intended for (you can do this during the virtual disk creation wizard as well)
- go to each server and tell it to rescan for hardware changes in the device manager
- go to each server and in disk management verify you can see the new disk
- initialize the disk (do not convert to dynamic disk (the Windows 2003 wizard asks for this, but defaults with this option unchecked)
- if you're running Windows 2003 SP1 or later, right click the disk (not the partition area) and select to convert to GPT
- create a partition, assign it a drive letter and format the disk
- on each server copy the data from the 'old' disk to the new disk (drag&drop or use a 3rd party utility (but NOT dynamic disk mirroring))
- verify the data is good on the new disk
Now to remove the old disk:
- optional: delete the partition in Windows and if desired you can then change the drive letter on the new disk to be what the old disk had
- shut down the server
- go into Navisphere and destroy the virtual disk in question
You then do this for each server and it's 'old' virtual disk.
After this you could re-use the newly available disk space for one of the existing servers or create disk space for a 5th server.
I suspect you'll have questions as I made several assumptions and didn't have all the information I needed (didn't have a full understanding of your intentions).
pgrooms
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November 9th, 2009 07:00
Yes I am on the lastest Flare version. I will be moving ALL data off the first four drives onto drives 4-7. All data is backed up and tested and all servers connected are 2003 Standard with Powerpath. Once the move is completed, I will use the first four drives as temporary storage since they have the OS on them.