Changing Local Disk Policy

[Mark Puchalski]

I have a UCS C220 M4S that is managed by USCM.  The server was built with (4) drives in a RAID10 config.  The Local Disk Configuration Policy in the service profile is RAID10 Mirrored and Striped, Protected.

I have added (2) additional drives that I wanted to configure in a RAID1 config as a second virtual drive.  At TAC's suggestion, I created the RAID1 config on the new drives via the RAID controller BIOS, since there is already a RAID10 virtual drive.  That worked fine.  However, the server now has an information fault in UCSM:  FI01-1 - Unified Computing System Server sys/rack-unit-1 does not fulfill Service profile XXXX  due to destructive-local-disk-config.

TAC now says I should create a new local disk configuration policy using the Any Configuration mode.  They've stated that since the RAID10 policy is set to protected, the current configuration will be maintained, but they're recommending an OS backup.  As this is a bare metal Windows server, I do not want to take the change that I'd have to perform a rebuild and restore of the server. 

Is this the correct process, assigning the new local disk config policy to the service profile, and rebooting the server?  Has anyone successfully done this before without causing any data destruction on existing drive?

[Wes Austin]

If you want to have more than one virtual drive managed by UCSM, you typically want to use storage profiles.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/sw/gui/config/guide/2-2/b_UCSM_GUI_Configuration_Guide_2_2/configuring_storage_profiles.html

Currently, you should be okay to use the any config option in the service profile and create a new RAID 1 VD via Webbios. This is a workaround if you only are making changes to a single server. If you plan to make this change to multiple servers, your best option would be using storage profiles. Think of the local disk policy as using all available hard drives to form the configuration outlined in the local disk policy. If you want to break up the local disks, you use storage profiles.

Anytime you are making storage related changes that may impact sensitive data, it is always good to have a known working backup.