Re: Migrating RAID1 to new system
Hi,
However, the RAID arrangement is proprietry and different to mdadm
and/or LVM. OTOH, I did once spent an hour on the phone with a very
helpful LSI engineer trying to rescue one here.
So, using the LSI in JOB (just a bunch of discs) mode, yes?
No, I believe it's RAID5 - 8x240GB.
I'm planning on replacing those disks with 4x1TB disks, which would
work on the onboard controllers. I still can't decide whether to
continue to use the LSI controller.
Actually, if I did use the onboard, I could use mdadm, take the system
down to perform the initial install, and sync the data from the LSI
disks while the system is running, then shut it down briefly to do the
final sync after the bulk of the data has transferred.
The LSI stuff is pretty good in my experience. Ran them in several
IBM
boxes and also at home for years.
I am inclined to believe it will perform better than mdadm.
>Using the LSI makes me nervous - there have been one or two times
when
>I almost lost the array, but I'll probably keep using it.
The important thing is to be able to monitor them. I've some scripts for
that - put them in a 5 minute cronjob. Or in your monitoring system eg
nagios. Then you will get timely emails if a problem occurs.
That sounds awesome. Do you know where I can find those scripts? I
forgot they used to be referred to as megaraid.
I wrote the cs.app.megacli Python module for this (see PyPI) and
have
some small auxiliary scripts which wrap it.
Can you forward it on?
>Another problem - just saw one of the 2TB disks I'm using for
backup is failing:
Are they a RAID? Or 2 independent drives and filesystems?
They are RAID1, directly connected to the onboard SATA, not through USB.
>> Do you have the hardware to assemble the new raidset with
the new
>> drives
>> and have both online at once (with two machines I suppose)?
>>
>> If so you can do the cp-then-rsync directly to the new drives without
>> the intermediate 2TB volume. Which means there's no time consuming copy
>> back.
>
>Because of the hardware RAID controller, I cannot.
Alas. Still, if you've got on board SATA in addition to the LSI
controller you could: copy the 1.3TB to external USB drives, install the
new OS on the SATA bus, swap out the old raidset for the new raidset,
copy back from the USB drives.
I have another system on the same network with like 7TB of data
available. I'm thinking that I sync a copy of the user data to that
system, and create a virtual machine on that system with the mail
server config that somehow mounts the directory on the host system.
Disable the production system and change the IP of the virtual machine
to assume that of the mail server. Users will then access this
temporary system while I rebuild the production system and transfer
back the data.
Once the initial bulk transfer has occurred, shut down services on the
virtual machine and sync the remaining user data back to the
production system.
Does this sound feasible?