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October 12th, 2022 05:00
Powervault MD3800i disaster recovery
Hi,
We had some extreme temperatures due to failed cooling in our datacenter. As a result, we now have a Powervault MD3800i with 3(!) failed HDD's. As a result, the disk group is failing since it was configured as RAID 6, which is capable of surviving only 2 failed HDD's...
We inserted replacement HDD's but are unsure how to get the disk group back online. Looks like deleting the array config and start over again is the only way to solve this. However, on the Setup tab in Modular Disk Storage Manager, there is an option to export the storage array configuration to a script so you can "clone" the setup to another Powervault. When running the script on import, there's an option to clear the current storageArray configuration. Is this something we could use? It would rule out any typing errors we could make by reconfiguring by hand and save some time.
Not sure what configuration is being cleared if we do this. I'm guessing all network related things like iSCSI ports and management ports reside on the controllers so those should not be affected....
Or are we wrong and we can't use that export method? If that's the case, has anyone had this kind of failure and how was that solved? Btw, w're not worried of losing the data. We have a back-up of the data and it's not recoverable anyway.
DELL-Chris H
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October 12th, 2022 12:00
Raymond0123,
Normally in most cases it will require reconfiguring the array, but since you state the data is backed up you can try recovering the array. You can try this by forcing the drive that failed last Online, if it succeeds then you should be able to rebuild the other two drives afterwards.
Now in regards to the configuration, what you could do, depending on the situation, is to pull a support bundle before reconfiguring it, in order to reference the configuration from there. The issue is if it isn't just that the Disk Group failed, and is that the entire MD is down, then you won't be able to pull that bundle.
Let me know if this helps.
Raymond0123
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October 13th, 2022 05:00
Hi Chris,
We replaced the disks since they were completely dead. There's no way I can find to get them online again within the existing disk group. The only option I do seem to have is to create a new disk group using the 3 newly inserted disks. Guess I'm going to have to delete the existing disk group and start from scratch.
Btw, thanks for mentioning to collect the Support bundle. Never knew (or bothered to look into) what this contains. Now I do have a really nice fallback to the original config of the array