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Fail Over Server the Easy Way?
We have two identical Dell PowerEdge 1650s in the same rack, one on top of the other. Server A is setup with hardware RAID 1, W2K, IIS5, and a third-part app. The file content is static, as the database is located elsewhere, on a mainframe.
Server B will be a fail-over server, NOT real-time. Just a back up server, in case Server A dies. Server B has nothing on it, no OS etc and is not connected to the network. But it is mirrored at the hardware level.
What I want to do (somehow!) is to use the hot swappable mirrored drive on Server A to completely mirror everything to Server B. The OS and apps, everything! It would seem that I could just remove the second drive from Server A and put it a drive bay on Server B, but this did not work. I know there is a SID on every Windows server, but Server B is off the network.
Ghost does not work (we tried), and I read on the Symantec site that Ghost does not support any RAID configurations.
DELL-GaryS
777 Posts
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October 16th, 2003 15:00
Before you start, make sure if it is ROMB, it is enabled in the system BIOS on Server B. Also make sure you keep the two RAID controllers at the same F/W revision, update both at the same time, so that the drivers will match when you do the fail over.
You might want to go into the RAID controller's BIOS on SERVER B when you install the drive from server A and :
If LSI, it will see a NVRAM mismatch select read from disk to import the RAID info from the new disk, save and exit, reenter again and rebuild the array. (if you boot to either machine while the disk is swapped you will need to rebuild the array when you return the disk to server A replace the blank drive and rebuild again and you are done.
If Adaptec, before you swap the drives, go into the controller BIOS on Server B, and make an identical array to the O/S array on server A, then after the scrub is complete, remove doth drives and install the swapped drive. bring up server B install 1 drive while running, and allow it to rebuild. bring up server A install the other blank drive and allow that to rebuild, and you are done.
DELL-GaryS
DELL-GaryS
777 Posts
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November 7th, 2003 18:00
Robin,
Send me a PM with your tags and contact info.
DELL-GaryS
RobinJatko
2 Posts
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November 7th, 2003 18:00
You wrote:
"You might want to go into the RAID controller's BIOS on SERVER B when you install the drive from server A and :
If Adaptec (yes it is!), before you swap the drives, go into the controller BIOS on Server B, and make an identical array to the O/S array on server A, then after the scrub is complete, remove doth drives and install the swapped drive. bring up server B install 1 drive while running, and allow it to rebuild. bring up server A install the other blank drive and allow that to rebuild, and you are done.
Gary: Both Server A & B have identical arrays that came preinstalled (RAID 1 hardware). BIOS is same (PE1650 A10). When I try above, I get the following errors after the RAID Controller starts up successfully on POST (or it appears to be successful to me), then---" BIOS not installed" then "No boot device available. Strike F1 to retry....." etc.
I must be doing something wrong.....Any thoughts? Thx, Robin