Upgrading drives in a PERC H730P Adapter RAID 10 array

If the automatic rebuild isnt startet you can mark the Disk as a Hotspare and assign the Hotspare to the diskgroup.

You cant mix different Type of disks like SAS / SATA and SSDs within a diskgroup. So a SSD ever cant be a Hotspare for a non SSD Diskgroup.

I can see the rebuild status within your NAGIOS monitoring so at least "omreport" will show it. I remeber that somewere was a progessbar within the iDRAC or OpenManage but i cant remember where.

Regards,

Joerg

Hi,

To top up with Joerg's reply:

SSDs cannot be mixed with disk drives within a virtual disk, it is not supported. Page 84: https://dl.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_ser_stor_net/esuprtl_adapters/poweredge-rc-h830_User's%20Guide_en-us.pdf. Another note to take on page 48, "The replacement disk must be of the same protocol and disk technology. For example, only a SAS hard drive can replace a SAS hard drive and only a SATA SSD can replace a SATA SSD."

If the hardware matches according to the requirement from user guide, the RAID array can automatically rebuild. On some occasions, you will need to assign the drive to the RAID array for it to rebuild. You can monitor the rebuild if it is successfully started, a new column in OMSA will appear on the Virtual Disk page, "Progress" column. Alternative to check is by using omconfig cli: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-my/000137721/how-to-rebuild-virtual-disk-via-openmanage-server-administrator-omsa

You can use OMSA to add hotspare to specific virtual array, it is under the action menu in the Virtual Disk page. But reminder, SSDs cannot be mixed with disk drives. 

Here's an article on assigning hotspare: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-my/000178190/dell-poweredge-how-to-assign-a-hard-drive-in-global-hot-spare

Is there a pathway whereby I can replace the HDDs on this machine with SSDs?  For example, can I create a second virtual disk comprised of the SSDs, mirror the first virtual disk to the second, then "retire" the first virtual disk and remove the HDDs?

The supported path would be to backup the existing HDD Virtual Disk, then delete and recreate it with the SSDs, then reinstall the OS and restore the data from backup. I state this as we don't support imaging to "mirror" it from one VD to another, as that has inherent instabilities compared to the supported path. 

Let me know if this helps.

This server is hosting a single hyper-v virtual machine.  There are local and remote hyper-v replicas of the virtual machine.  The virtual machine is running OLTP Windows database. 

I don't have a service window long enough to backup, do a fresh install, restore and allow for problems that arise.  Is there a fail-safe solution?  

What do you think of this as a fail-safe solution?

1. Install 2x 2TB enterprise SSDs
2. Create RAID 1 array via PERC H730P
3. Use Hyper-V live storage migration to move VM from HDD array to SSD array

VM continues running throughout the process and VM performance gets the benefit of the new faster SSD array.  The host OS stays on the HDD array.