پیکربندی هارد Spare در سرورهای HP Proliant با استفاده از ACU
A spare hard drive act like a spare tire of your car. It helps when you experience a flat tire situation. Same way, spare hard drive helps when we have a hard drive failure happens in a RAID array. Let us see how to assign an online spare HDD to a HDD array using HP Array configuration Utility (ACU). In order to assign a spare HDD to an existing HDD array, you need to use tools provided HP. One of the utility which can be used to assign spare HDD is Array Configuration Utility.
When a Hard drive fails in an array, the spare HDD will be kicked-in and the array will rebuild to the spare HDD. If HDD fails during Server operation, the HP Smart Array controller automatically begins rebuilding each logical drive onto the online spare, this is a very automated process and no user intervention is required. Once the Array/Logical drive rebuild operation is completed, the Server is back to the normal condition. Now you can go ahead and replace the failed HDD on the server.
In order to configure spare HDD using ACU, you need to have one unassigned HDD available on your server. Unassigned HDD means, one HDD which is not used by any of the arrays or logical drives on your server. Without wasting time, let us see how to configure online spare (also called as Hots pare HDD) using HP array configuration utility.
Configure Online Spare Hard drive (Hotspare) using HP ACU:
You need to open Array configuration utility on your Server. There are different ways to open HP Array Configuration Utility on your Server. If Windows OS is installed on your Server, then you can find HP ACU listed under Programs –> HP System Tools –> HP Array Configuration Utility. If Linux is installed, then you may need to run the hpacucli command in Linux. You may also check this link for more information on HP ACU. Follow the method which applies to you and open the HP Array Configuration Utility on your Server.
You can change the view in HP Array Configuration utlity so that you will get a better idea of number of hard drives installed. Here change the View to Physical View and you will find 5 HDDs are listed. Total we have five 146GB SAS hard drives installed.
Let us create an array using four Hard drives and later we will assign the fifth hard drive as a spare. Before we do that we need to create an array. To do so , click on Create Array now.
Select the hard drives from the list. We have selected 4 HDDs here. We have selected four hard drives which are installed in HDD Bay 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the Server. Once you select the HDDs, click on OK button.
Once you follow above said steps, HP Array Configuration Utility would have created a new Array, possibly named as SAS Array A (Please check the screenshot). Next you need to create a new Logical drive on the newly created SAS Array A. to create a new Logical drive, you need to click on Create Logical Drive button.
Now you could select the RAID level for your logical drive. Select the RAID level (Fault tolerance) for the logical drive and click on Save button. Here, we have selected RAID 5 as fault tolerance. You should not select RAID 0 here because you cannot be assign a spare HDD to RAID 0.
Now Logical drive is created (Name will be changed to SAS Array A – 1 Logical drive). To assign a spare hard drive to the newly created array and logical drive, you need to click on the array name in left pane of window (here it is SAS Array A) and click on Spare Management button.
Select the hard drive which you want to assign as a spare. In our case, we will use the HDD which was in hard drive Bay number 5 as online Spare. Once you select the HDD, click on Save button.
That is it. The spare HDD is assigned to SAS Array A. The spare HDD color will be changed to Green in ACU. If any of the HDDs installed Bay 1, 2, 3 or 4 fails, then the spare HDD installed in Bay 5 will come and rescue the array.
Once you are done with steps, you could exit the Array Configuration Utility!. If you are using latest HP Servers, then you need to use HP Smart Storage Administrator. This utility also helps you to set a Online Spare HDD for a RAID array.