More disks in a UCS240 platform - best practice

[Danny Meyer]

Hi.

I have a 6 disk UCS240 safety and security platform server that I would like to expand to 12 disks (RAID 6 setup).

The supported RAID upgrade path section in the user guide states, that you have to reimage the server for this?

I was under the impression, with a new hardware platform, RH based, one could expand the existing RAID?

Really would like to safe costly time here by not reimage.

Thanks for your hint and experience.

Danny

[Scott Olsen]

I'm not 100% sure on what Cisco claims they will support... but it's not really reasonable for them to expect a customer to re-image just to EXPAND capacity.  That would be ridiculous.

There's really no reason you can't take a maintenance window and

1. Add the additional RAID6 array to the server chassis.  
2. It then gets exposed to RHEL as a block device.
3. use parted to create a/the partition(s) on the device.
4. Format them with the XFS filesystem
5. Create the new mountpoints at /media# and add them to the fstab.
6. At this point they *should* show up under the media server configuration to be selected for archiving, clipping, etc...

Now... once you get this far, there is something pretty important to note;  Your video archives won't automatically rebalance across all the repositories (as would be ideal).  In fact, it won't even happen over time.  The issue is that VSM appears to set the 'media repo location' for all video archives for a given stream *once* upon creation, and it will remain that way indefinitely.

There's a script that Cisco has around somewhere that allows an administrator to re-balance the archiving locations manually, but you'd need to engage TAC to acquire it and receive guidance on its use.

Sorry, wish I had better news.

Cheers!

[Danny Meyer]

Hi Scott.

Many thanks for your great feedback. Indeed, the BU is here a bit limited with their viewd of how to manage a recording server when it comes to upgrades.

I have feeded this back to them and hope that one day, they will be more flexible.

Unfortunately, till now it really means a new setup with only one raid. But your points were very helpful indeed.

I will inform this place when I have a helpful feedback.

Cheers

Danny