Breaking RAID-1 while running

[marco.shaw]

Ciscu UCS C200 M2 with RHEL 5.7 64-bit

I have a situation where I'm going to have to break the RAID-1 (hardware) setup that I have every quarter.  I'm going to have to pull out one of the drives, ship it off site, and replace it with another, and have the mirror rebuild.

Are there any Linux utilities for me to interact with the system at this level?  I'm pretty sure I won't be forced to do this while the system is running, so likely the safest bet is to shut the system down, pull the drive, then replace it with a new one?

I'm going to run some tests, but was wondering if there are any particular tricks, documentation, etc. to help me determine best practices here?

[kg6itcraig]

Somebody has to double check me on this, but if you have RAID1 running via Local Disk policy the OS shouldn't know about the RAID 1 pair and it will be rebuilt for you at RAID controller level.

Craig

[marco.shaw]

Several years ago when I was working on another vendor's hardware, they had utilities for all supported OS to be able to query/interact with the hardware.  I can't remember exactly, but I'm wondering if one utility could at least query the status of any controllers.  For example, to get a status of it rebuilding.  Maybe one couldn't make actual changes like tell the controller to break a mirror by removing drive X...

[e.nieuwstad]

When I did some tests at a customer site the progress of the rebuild could be checked from the server when the LSI drivers were installed. The server was running win2k8 in this case. Not sure what the options are in the linux driver.

I think both links will give you more than sufficient options to install the drivers and manage all drives from a single management point.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/unified_computing/ucs/c/sw/os/linux/install/CSERIES-LINUX.pdf

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/unified_computing/ucs/3rd-party/lsi/mrsas/userguide/LSI_MR_SAS_SW_UG.pdf