Upgrading storage - best way?

mooseracing · Thu Feb 07, 2013 2:30 pm

Now that the market has platter hard drives again I am looking at increasing our spindle capacity to get a bump in performance. Right now we have 2 Raid 10's, one with 4 disk and one with 8. Both will be brought up to 10 disks each. I'm hoping to take better advantage of my 10Gb network as well between our Starwind HA nodes and Hyper V nodes. The only way I see of getting any more out of my setup is switching to SSD's or upgrading to something like Supermicros case that holds 72 drives. We'll be adding more memory as well.

What is the recommended way to replace all the hard drives in the system?

Move data out of .img files, create new targets and images then copy data in?
Move img files to another location, replace drives, copy imgs back, then import/attach, and sync?

Another way?

edit: forgot to mention, apparently last time I reconfigured our setup, I must have been half asleep. On the HA1 I have Disk1 on the smaller raid setup and Disk 2 on the larger one. On HA2 I have it the opposite, so I am being limited right now. I'm assumign the answer to above would be the same way I could correct this issue and get the img files on the correct RAID set?

jeddyatcc · Fri Feb 08, 2013 11:47 am

On one device I would remove the replicas, upgrade the storage, add the replicas back pointing at the new storage,then let synchronization take place. Once that is done perform the same on the other node. On a semi-side note most of the RAID controllers that I work with would allow me to expand my RAID 10 to 2 or 4 more drives. Then I would just resize the volume in windows.

Mon Feb 11, 2013 10:26 am

mooseracing, have you got any update on this please?

mooseracing · Tue Feb 12, 2013 8:23 pm

I guess I am still looking for the recommended way? I will be replacing all the drives not just expanding the RAID size.

I will be on 6.x before I do this move, currently on 5.9.1949

kmax · Wed Feb 13, 2013 2:41 pm

Not sure on your raid controller but...

If you swap one drive at a time and let it rebuild after each swap, you should be able to expand your raid after all of them are swapped out. That will save the hassle of redoing the config.

As for the other issue with the img files on the wrong drive...and this probably probably isn't recommended but I don't see why it wouldn't work...

Stop starwind service
Copy img files to new location
Edit starwind.cfg file and change drive letters (you'll spot them easily in the file) pointing to the new img file location
restart starwind service

Fri Feb 15, 2013 11:28 am

Stop starwind service
Copy img files to new location
Edit starwind.cfg file and change drive letters (you'll spot them easily in the file) pointing to the new img file location
restart starwind service

That can work too. Just be careful while editing - don`t misstype anything.

currently on 5.9.1949

You mean 5.8, correct?

mooseracing · Fri Feb 15, 2013 6:54 pm

Yes 5.8.x.

I'll try the config file edit as that seems relatively easy. Famous last words

I order 40 - 2.5" 15k Savio's. So hopefully my performance is going to jump during Good Friday weekend, as that is my window for the upgrade of storage. Tonight I plan on moving the img locations and editing the config, tomorrow off to 6.x we go.

Mon Feb 18, 2013 1:55 pm

Any update here? Had you any chance to setup everything according to the plan?

mooseracing · Mon Feb 18, 2013 3:51 pm

6 is up and going, things went smoothly to my surprise.

Since you ask though, I went to create a new disk img today and am slightly confused at what is going on. I stepped through the steps for an HA device and I am now at the point of specifying interfaces for Sync and HB. I've attached a screen shot of what I am doing to help make things cleared. I would expect to be able to check the boxes individually, but I can't. IF I click one all of them move. So I can't specify which is my HB and which is the sync. All of the 192 address are direct connect, no switch. The 172 is the corporate network interface. It's almost like it won't allow it on the same network even though they aren't on a switch. I don't remember this being a problem on 5.8

Wed Feb 20, 2013 12:43 pm

Yeah, its new. This question is well explained here: http://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-faq#q_22

mooseracing · Wed Feb 20, 2013 3:19 pm

Ok, so following the steps there to change HB, I dropped one of the HA images on the partner. Both HA nodes have another NIC plugged into eachother that is in the 192.168.12.x. I go to replication manager, walk through the steps and get stuck at the choosing interfaces. My new 192.168.12.x choices are greyed out. They can ping each other fine, why would they be greyed out?

Mon Feb 25, 2013 12:57 pm

May I ask you to give us the screenshots please?

mooseracing · Mon Feb 25, 2013 4:21 pm

Here is the interface list. Also it doesn't matter which host IP I choose when setting this up, they stay greyed out.

Wed Feb 27, 2013 4:35 pm

It looks like the network was not picked up on the second host. Can I ask you to open the SW Mgmt console, connect to host, goto Configuration->Network, take the screenshot and provide it to us?

Thanks

CCI · Thu Feb 28, 2013 3:35 am

Double check netmask in windows ip settings box