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Combine PERC Internal and External disks?
I have a PowerEdge R720XD
It currently has (12) 8TB HDD drives in a RAID5 on a PERC H710P
I need more storage, and would want to get a powervault MD1200 series or something. I see I would need to get something like a PERC H810 to connect the powervault up to.
My question is, can I add the disks from the powervault into the my existing RAID5 virtual disk? I don't want to have 2 volumes, I need one larger volume.
Is this possible? If not, are there other alternatives I should consider? (Upgrading the size of the 8TB drives is not what I'm looking for)
One alternative I've thought of would be to get (2) MD1200's and move the existing (12) local drives to one of the MD1200's and add another (12) drives to the 2nd MD1200 and then do it that way. Is that the best option?
Dell-DylanJ
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September 28th, 2020 14:00
Hello,
The disks within the PowerVault unit would be in their own virtual disk, not in the single virtual disk configuration that you're looking for.
To answer your second question, it isn't something that is supported and I haven't tried it myself, but I figure it may work. You'll need to import it, as the drives would get picked up as a foreign configuration in the best case. If you aren't able to just import the drives when prompted though, retagging the array would be the next thing to try. This would involved going into the PERC utility for the H810 after the drives are installed, selecting all the member disks, creating another array with the same configuration, and then deliberately *NOT* initializing the array. What we're hoping to accomplish is rewriting the RAID data stamp, without losing the data.
That having been said, I do absolutely recommend making sure that you have a known good backup of your data, just in case of any issues while working with your array. The standard method would involve restoring from backup to a new virtual disk anyway, so having that available is definitely a good idea.
Let me know if this helps.
lanman9000
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September 28th, 2020 18:00
If I'm going to have to go the MD1200 route, how do these steps sound?
1) Install first MD1200 with PERC H810 loaded with (12) new 8TB drives
2) Configure RAID5 array using these 12 disks and wait for array to initialize
3) Copy data from the local RAID5 array to the MD1200 RAID5 array
4) Connect second MD1200 to (PERC H810 or the first MD1200??) and move the (12) local disks to the second MD1200
5) Add the previously local (but now in the second MD1200) disks to the existing MD1200 RAID5 array and do an 'online capacity expansion' and just wipe away the old RAID5 config on those disks
6) After RAID5 array has fully initialized I now have a (24) disk RAID5 array spread across (2) MD1200's.
7) Profit?
DELL-Joey C
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September 28th, 2020 21:00
Hi,
From what you have laid out the steps, seems to be doable. Though, why don't you connect both MDs in cascade. https://dell.to/2Sa3cuA
Though, I'm not too sure if it's possible to do RAID5 across all drive on both MD, I've not done it before. But it's totally not recommended. The likeliness of getting data loss on that configuration of RAID5 on all drives are very high (assuming it's possible to do that). RAID5 is fault tolerance is only 1, in which if there is 1 fault in each MD, you would face data loss. It would be recommend to do separate RAID for each MD and use high RAID level.
Let me know your thoughts.