Migrating RAID Array - LSI MegaRAID 9240-8i

[lovelldr]

Hi all.

 

So, at one of my schools, the HDD storage is getting a little thin on the ground... Currently, the system has 2 x 146gb SAS drives running in raid 1, and 3 x 500gb sata drives running in raid 5 to 1tb...

 

The raid 1 setup is used for most accessed stuff, like my documents, shared folders etc, with the 1tb raid 5 mainly used for software installs and multimedia storage... The 1tb is fine, but it's the 146gb that's running low. So, I got 2 x 600gb sas drives to replace them, thinking I'd just use a migrate like I've done before in my nas... But then, I finally just thought, I'm not sure of the process of how to migrate the drives using this RAID controller...

 

Has anyone done it before? Will be looking at taking full backups beforehand, so that don't need to worry about loss of data (hopefully!!!! lol).

 

So, I'm guessing that I will need to take one of the drives in the array offline using the MegaRAID software. I will then swap over the HDD (guess will need to shut it down to do that?! Will do anyway, just to be safe ). I will then click the Replace Physical drive option in the software:

 

 

I assume then that the data is copied over to the new drive...

 

But, I'm a bit unsure of the next step... How do I make the new drive larger? Do I need to do something similar to the following link:

 

http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-030751.htm

 

Restart the system and enter the Intel® Rapid Storage Technology option ROM by pressing Ctrl and i when prompted.

Click Reset Disks to Non-RAID.

Note You may see a dialog box warning you of data loss. This warning does not apply to RAID 1; you will still be able to access your data.

Click Yes to confirm.

Click Exit and shut off the system.

Remove the original (smaller) hard drive from the system. This will leave only the new (larger) hard drive, acting as a single hard drive (it is no longer part of a RAID volume).

Turn on the system and boot into Windows. You may need to change the hard drive priority in order to boot.

From within Windows, use the Windows computer management tools or a third party partitioning software in order to resize the hard drive partition so that it uses the entire capacity of the hard drive.

 

Obviously will need to do something like that within the LSI RAID, but do I follow that step? And then convert to a RAID1 again using the software, or do I remove the smaller hdd from the raid array like earlier, and add it, and then use some method of making the driver larger???

 

Any guidance would be appreciated

 

Many thanks,

 

David

[Duke]

I've seen this work before in theory like you've described, but I've also seen it go horribly wrong.

 

Are you confident that your backups are good and will restore as expected? If so then I'd be tempted to say just create a new array from scratch with the disks/size/RAID type that you want, and then restore the data.

 

If you do try it through RAID expansion, the process is usually something like:

 

1. Replace one existing disk in the array with larger disk
   
2. Allow the array to rebuild until it is completely healthy again
   
3. Replace next disk, and repeat steps 1 and 2 until all the disks have been replaced with larger ones and the array is healthy
   
4. Go into the array controller BIOS (or Windows-based GUI tools) and expand the array to make use of the larger disks (note - this isn't supported by all RAID cards)
   
5. Once the array is expanded and healthy again, go into Windows disk management and expand the disk volume to make use of the newly available space (if the OS isn't Windows or you run into problems, check out GParted)
   

 

 

Cheers,

Chris

[lovelldr]

I've seen this work before in theory like you've described, but I've also seen it go horribly wrong.

 

Are you confident that your backups are good and will restore as expected? If so then I'd be tempted to say just create a new array from scratch with the disks/size/RAID type that you want, and then restore the data.

 

If you do try it through RAID expansion, the process is usually something like:

 

1. Replace one existing disk in the array with larger disk
   
2. Allow the array to rebuild until it is completely healthy again
   
3. Replace next disk, and repeat steps 1 and 2 until all the disks have been replaced with larger ones and the array is healthy
   
4. Go into the array controller BIOS (or Windows-based GUI tools) and expand the array to make use of the larger disks (note - this isn't supported by all RAID cards)
   
5. Once the array is expanded and healthy again, go into Windows disk management and expand the disk volume to make use of the newly available space (if the OS isn't Windows or you run into problems, check out GParted)
   

 

 

Cheers,

Chris

 

Thanks for that Chris

 

I've got a couple of different backup sets, but I will also image the hdd before I start to migrate it... Hopefully all will go well!!! Will be doing it over the coming half-term, so at least have a few days to try and get everything working again afterwards if all goes wrong (hopefully won't need to tho!!!)

[Duke]

Shall keep my fingers crossed for you sir.

[lovelldr]

Well, all went well...

 

Waited until over half term to do the job so that server wouldn't be disrupting staff/pupils... Glad I did, took ages for the whole process to complete...

 

Process I took:

 

1. Shutdown server, remove 1st hdd in array

2. Restart server, server complained disk missing, do I want to go to raid software. Went to software, and saw it was rebuilding array.

3. Wait about 8 hours for the array to finish rebuilding, by which time I Had gone home, as took ages for the backup to complete! lol

4. Got back in in the morning, shut down, and removed second disk. Restarted, and same process as above

5. Restart, go to raid software, and tell it to expand the array.

6. Wait for ages whilst it does the background initialisation.

7. Restart in to a startup disk to re-allocate the partition sizes (could've skipped this, but I wanted to increase the 1st partition size as well as the 2nd).

 

But, all went well. So thumbsup on that.

 

Woohoo, another 300gb of stuff for the staff to fill up! Wonder how long that will take, hehe

[Duke]

Woo, nice one!

 

If you've got hot-swap drives then you shouldn't need to shut down in order to remove/add the drives, but better safe than sorry if you're not sure.

 

Glad you got it sorted out.