Raid-1 to Raid-5 Migration on-the-fly w/ IBM ServeRAID 6i

[alieas]

Hello!

I have a two disk 74GB/74GB RAID-1 Mirrored environment. Today I added a 3rd disk. In the IBM ServeRAID Management Console, the new drive has been identified. There is now an option to migrate from the RAID-1 to a RAID-5.

Every piece of documentation I can find on the net seems to suggest that you can do this on the fly. I am planning on doing it tonight when there is minimal server usage, however, I am curious to know if anyone has done this before, and if there are any potential pitfalls..

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/eserver/v1r2/index.jsp?topic=/diricinfo/fqy0_achgraid.html

Thank you!

 

[alieas]

So yes, this worked excellent. The ServeRAID Mangement software successfully migrated from a RAID-1 to a RAID-5 without incidient.

http://advancingnetworks.com/ibm_raid.jpg

Here is a snapshot of the software showing the 3rd drive added. Now I am wondering, is there a way I can "grow" a logical drive / partition size to add this new space to one of my existing partitions?

You can see by the picture, that there is one 70GB Logical Drive. This is because there were originally (2) 70GB drives, in a RAID-1 Mirror. Now there are (3) 70GB in a RAID-5, which should give 140GB of total space to work with.

Does anyone have any experience growing logical devices in this manner? Or am I stuck with just creating another partition? Thanks for the input!~


-alieas

 

[Mondoman]

It'll be an OS issue. Once you get the details for whatever OS you are using, you can test it by creating a very small new partition, adding some files, and then trying to "grow" it.

 

[alieas]

The OS is Microsoft Windows Server 2003.