CCM Remove Disk

francois.staiesse · ‎10-25-2007

Dears,

I have Cisco MCS 7845 H1 servers (2 disks using mirroring) and I would like to have a full weekly backup of my publisher.

For this, every week, I will remove the hard disk in slot 1 and replace it by another one.

What is the best way to do this?

Do I have to do a shutdown of the server before removing the hard disk in slot 1 or can I "hot unplug" the hard disk in slot 1 and then "hot plug" the new one?

The best solution would be without having to stop/start the server but I'm not sure that I'm allowed to do this.

Is there a way to stop/eject the hard disk in slot 1 before removing it from the server without stopping the server?

Thx,

Francois

olighec · ‎10-25-2007

Francois,

I wouldn't suggest doing that as a backup method, as you would be essentially breaking the RAID set every week and forcing a rebuild. I would imagine that the high amount of disk insertions and removals would also stress the internal SCA connectors and could accelerate failure of one or more components.

As far as I know, there is no way to "pause" a RAID set other than destroying the array in ACU which would erase all data from the array and you sure don't want to do that! :)

I know with CCM6 there are HP tape drives that are supported by Cisco as backup devices. Can you use one of those instead?

Rob Huffman · ‎10-25-2007

Hi Francois,

I really have to agree with Chris on this one! When we first started out with Cisco IPT on MCS Servers I thought that this was a great plan and started down this path. Well, sure enough the constant removal and replacement of the drives caused drive failures and was really unreliable due to the fact you never knew when one would fail :(

We now rely on BARS (DR- backups on new builds). It is probably a more cost effective solution to just practice re-builds every once in a while if you have any lab setup.

Just my 2 cents,

Rob

Ayodeji Okanlawon · ‎10-25-2007

In addition, whatever you do never power down your server to swap disks. I have seen where a total loss of service happened due to this.

The reason been that, your array controller reads the raid setting on the disks. If for some reason you power down and power up with a disk with a different raid configuration, then the array controller gets confused.

The disks are hot swappable, so if you ever want to swap disk, always leave your server on!

Please rate all useful posts