Drive replacement showing as Non-RAID on R520 with PERC H310

Question

Hello, We have a Dell PowerEdge R520 that was found to have a failed drive. The system is running ESX and hosting multiple VMs, as well as has a RAID 5 that utilizes six 1.2 TB 10k 6GB/s SAS disks, with three virtual disks on it, as well as a RAID 1 that has two  500GB SSD SATA drives on it for a datastore. We ordered an identical drive and swapped out the failed unit for the new one. However, upon replacement, the drive shows up as 'Non-RAID' and when attempting to reassign it as the new Global Hot Spare, we are receiving a quite concerning warning message. The message reads as ' RAC0516: Converting physical disk drives to RAID-compatible will overwrite any OS-created RAID arrays. Make sure that there are no OS-configured RAID arrays, and then click OK.' We've never encountered this with any other servers, but this is also the only server we have running multiple arrays with multiple virtual disks on them. If we're reading this correctly, are we to understand that we cannot reintroduce this replacement disk back into the RAID disk pool without losing everything on this server? If this isn't the case, can you please explain how this will complete without destroying the current RAIDs and the associated virtual disks that this server is hosting? Thank you in advance for all the help.

DELL-Josh Cr · Accepted Answer

You may need to reboot the server.

DELL-Josh Cr · Answer

Hi, You can click yes, it is just saying that it will clear any data on the replacement drive when it converts it from a standalone drive to a RAID disk.

McGuinty · Answer

Josh,

Thank you for your help. We've clicked on the OK button. However, it's been close to 30 mins now and the Job Queue still shows the convert to RAID task as "Start Time: Now" but status is "Scheduled (0%). When we go back to look at the Global Hostspare menu it says one cannot be created until the current drive task completes.

Is there something we're missing here? If it's set to run now and listed as scheduled, why is it not initializing the task?

Thanks again for any help you can provide.

DELL-Josh Cr · Answer

Try quitting openmanage and launching it again to see if it updated.

McGuinty · Answer

So it's now been a couple hours and even after closing out and logging back into the iDRAC, it still says Scheduled (0%). Any ideas?

McGuinty · Answer

OK, we'll need to schedule the outage as this is a 24/7 shop. We'll update once the reboot has be completed.

McGuinty · Answer

This will be a necro post, but I wanted to update. We did end up rebooting and the process did complete. At which point we were able to juggle storage around to allow us to rebuild the RAID with additional disks and reinstall a new version of ESXi on the server, all the while keeping the VMs safe on separate set of disks setup in a temporary RAID.

Thanks for the help.

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