On 6/23/06, Alex Zbyslaw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Alex Franks wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I'm getting ready to install 2 identical drives into the available
> drive bays in my 2850. However, it would be highly preferable that
> this machine NOT be shut down in order to install these drives. I know
> from looking at the docs that these drive bays are hot-swappable, but
> I'd like to know before I attempt this that someone else out there has
> successfully performed a hot-swap or hot-install of drives on a 2850
> or comparable Dell PowerEdge running FreeBSD.
RAID-1 I assume and PERC 4e/Di. Yes, did it when testing fresh
machines. The controller BIOS has a setting for how much resource to
allocate to the recovery of the inserted drive (0?-100%); the lower you
set it the slower it will recover the disk, but the higher you set it
the slower the machine will go. I think we went for 70% as the machine
never gets *that* heavy disk usage.
If the machine isn't live yet, then just do a basic install from CD (<30
mins) and then try the hotswap test. That way you can't lose any data
even if something goes wrong.
My advice with these machines is never to swap any disk with the machine
off - the controller gets confused. Stick with hotswapping and it seems
fine. I think you can set up an auto-spare so that if a disk fails the
array is rebuilt automatically using the spare.
Use sysutils/megarc for monitoring the RAID from BSD.
--Alex
Thanks for the input,
The drives hot-plugged just fine. The machine was live when I plugged
the disks and still is right now. I'm trying to avoid another trip to
the colo today to (safely) reboot by finding out if/where the drives
are loaded at the hardware level and how I can go about mounting them
to logical partitions. At this point, I'm not as concerned about
getting the 2 drives into RAID1 since they're going to be used for
backup purposes and will not be used in a high volume capacity (for
now), and since this would almost certainly require a reboot. I *know*
rebooting is preferable, but I'm experimenting here, and uptime is
pretty important since the server is the main mysql box for a handful
of websites.
The controller is a Perc 4e/Di as assumed, and I'm still a little
unsure as to whether the 2 drives that shipped with the machine are
currently set up in a RAID array. The current filesystem is mounted on
/dev/amrd0s1[a-f] and I would expect to find the new drives named
similarly after using some useful utility that I'm unaware of. Any
thoughts?
Thanks again.
Alex
_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
