SVM: tearing down and putting back a RAID 5 on the same system?


Hi folks.

I have a mail server that currently has its mail spool on 3 disks in a
RAID 5 with one hot spare.

We need to replace it with 2 larger disks in a mirror - not a root mirror,
just a plain old mirror. It probably goes without saying that I want to
minimize downtime on this server.

To do this, I've been planning to tear down the RAID 5, remove those
disks, and set up a mirror in the now-unoccupied drive bays. The
tearing-down commands I had in mind are:

metadb -f -d /dev/dsk/c0t8d0s7
metadb -f -d /dev/dsk/c0t10d0s7
metadb -f -d /dev/dsk/c0t12d0s7
metaclear -f hsp001
metaclear -f /dev/md/dsk/d6

....or perhaps just:

metaclear -f -r /dev/md/dsk/d6

My question is this: If for some reason the new root mirror doesn't work
out, is there a way to set the unchanged four disks in the RAID 5 back up
again, without losing the data that is on them? And are they truly
"unchanged" if I run the commands above? "metaimport -r" seems to
think they aren't importable on my test system, after running the
metaclear -r above.

Can disksets do this (tear down and put back without data loss)? And if
so, is this a Solaris 10-only feature? I'm doing this on Solaris 8 10/01.

Thanks!

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: DC RAID Configuration
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    (microsoft.public.win2000.active_directory)
  • Re: enlarging a RAID mirror volumne under IAA
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    (alt.sys.pc-clone.dell)
  • Re: Making a RAID array
    ... hard it might be to set up my own RAID array. ... and then set it up to do RAID. ... disks to that, but I'd like to see how easy it is to do it in the Mac ... If I add disks to the mirror set, ...
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  • Re: Exchange Disks
    ... Logs raid 1 mirror ... consider single drives for the OS and or Logs instead of mirrors. ... Is there some sort of rule-of-thumb for setting up disks based on a number ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.setup)
  • Re: SVM: tearing down and putting back a RAID 5 on the same system?
    ... Remove any metadb's on the 3 disks. ... RAID 5 with one hot spare. ... We need to replace it with 2 larger disks in a mirror - not a root mirror, ...
    (comp.unix.solaris)