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Migrating RAID's from a Perc 6/i to Perc 5/i
I have 2 server that I need to swap between. They are both 2950 with Perc controllers with the newest firmware. I need to place the drives that are in the 2950 with the Perc 6/i into the 2950 with the Perc 5/i. I was told that the Perc 5/i will see it as a Foreign Configuration and that I can import it and it should be fine.
I was just wondering if anyone had any experiences with it.
I am creating an image of them prior to the migration.
Thanks (I plan on posting results)
grm139
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May 1st, 2009 09:00
Migrating RAID volumes from PERC 5 to PERC 6 should not be a problem. The new VDs on the PERC 6 system will appear as foreign and you only need to migrate them. Depending on the configuration of the PERC 6 system the migration may be executed automatically. Making a backup of your volumes before this operation is a good idea. If you are migrating the boot volumes and there are other volumes on the system you may need to mark the new volume as first to boot from the controller BIOS configuration utility.
Migration RAID volumes from PERC 6 to PERC 5, may present some problems because new features not existing on PERC 5 were introduced on PERC 6 and not everything is compatible moving to the older device. According to the PERC 6 user guide (http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/storage/RAID/PERC6/en/PDF/en_ug.pdf): “Virtual disks that were created on the PERC 5 family of controllers can be migrated to the PERC 6 and CERC 6i controllers without risking data or configuration loss. Migrating virtual disks from PERC 6 and CERC 6i controllers to PERC 5 is not supported.”
samp76
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May 2nd, 2009 06:00
Ok. Here is how it went.
I performed an Image of the paritions overnight. Came in this morning and swapped drives from the Perc 6/i server to the Perc 5/i server. Booted it up and it does not see the configuration at all. So I entered into the RAID bios on the Perc 5/i and reconfigured the raids how they were on the other server, but I did NOT initialize the virtual disks. Exited BIOS and restarted.
Poof, it booted up and partitions were perfect.
If anyone else was to try this I would make sure that the following was done first.
1. Write down the exact raid configuration from the Perc 6/i from the RAID bios. If you used custom raid settings, like the block size, be sure and get that too,
2. Full backup (image sugggested)
3. DO NOT initialize the VD's after reconfiguration of the raid.
Enjoy, now I am going home (since it is Saturday)
samp76
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May 2nd, 2009 06:00
FYI: The Perc 6/i did see the Perc 5/i config and would have imported it, if I wanted it to. But I wanted to rebuild that server anyways.