Ghosting an array..

Street

Street

Street

Soldato
Joined
17 Jan 2005
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Location
Liverpool
I've just got back from a company who called me out to fix their server. Upon looking at the server, it was one of the worst configured I have seen. The OS was on a SCSI drive by itself with no mirror and the data was held on two 36GB SCSI drives in RAID 0!!

They have two servers, one domain controller and one terminal services server and they are both set up identically. I was called down to replace the OS drive in the domain controller as it had failed.

I have made a recommendation to them to sort the arrays out and have 4 72GB drives in each. I would set them up as two sets of two drives in RAID 1 in both servers.

The OS drives, I am just going to mirror in the OS as the array controller requires the drives to be erased to build an array. However, is it possible to set up an additional RAID 1 array in the server and use Ghost to image from the RAID 0 array to it?

The server is an HP Proliant ML350 with a 641 Smart Array controller in it.

Will Ghost work OK with that controller and allow me to do it?

Cheers for any advice,
Andy
 
Acronis has been my choice for doing this.
I also would not mess with software raid, if its worth doing its worth doing properly.
Using the acronis cd back up the server to a usb drive or network share, recreate the raid configuration(on spare disks if possible in case it goes wrong you can revert!) & restore the data again.

The terminal server really only needs a mirror set, assume its not a file server also!
Also worth staying away from raid 5 on this controller unless a battery is fitted as they are slow with no write back cache.
 
Street said:
I've just got back from a company who called me out to fix their server. Upon looking at the server, it was one of the worst configured I have seen. The OS was on a SCSI drive by itself with no mirror and the data was held on two 36GB SCSI drives in RAID 0!!
Click to expand...

I've seen a RAID0 on an SBS server, with no backup solution, and the company asked me to stick BES on there as well (they thought it was better to spend money on that than on a proper backup).

Crazy
 
m_cozzy said:
Acronis has been my choice for doing this.
I also would not mess with software raid, if its worth doing its worth doing properly.
Using the acronis cd back up the server to a usb drive or network share, recreate the raid configuration(on spare disks if possible in case it goes wrong you can revert!) & restore the data again.

The terminal server really only needs a mirror set, assume its not a file server also!
Also worth staying away from raid 5 on this controller unless a battery is fitted as they are slow with no write back cache.
Click to expand...

If they don't have the cache on the 641, you could tell them to purchase it and add it on (pt code 351580-B21) :) still readily available as it is the same module used on the E200
 
Yup Acronis here for several ml350s running pairs of raid 1 74gb drives.
Ive set them up to backup nightly and have also copied a bare build onto a spare drive and removed it back to my office where it can be looked after!
 
oddjob62 said:
I've seen a RAID0 on an SBS server, with no backup solution, and the company asked me to stick BES on there as well (they thought it was better to spend money on that than on a proper backup).

Crazy
Click to expand...

Just out of curiosity, which version of BES was it? And what are the most common blackberries they used? We have some problems with our server not synchronising with the latest phones.
 
Schnippzle said:
Just out of curiosity, which version of BES was it? And what are the most common blackberries they used? We have some problems with our server not synchronising with the latest phones.
Click to expand...

Was a while back... think it was one of the early 4.1 releases, if not the first... i seem to recall it had "issues" with the installation, as the more recent installs I've done have been smooth, Can't remember what devices they were, it was a small insignificant company tbh.

I've got 4.1 installed at my current place and have tried out some of the latest BBs and not had any issue.
 
Schnippzle said:
Just out of curiosity, which version of BES was it? And what are the most common blackberries they used? We have some problems with our server not synchronising with the latest phones.
Click to expand...

Thats probably because you suck at your job! :p

Well I have got 7 new SCSI drives on order.. Should be a fun job for me sometime next week! :D
 
Its a G3.. Have got the disks on order now anyway so I'll soon find out if it works or not! :)

Edit: Love the Oxygene cover in your sig btw! :D
Edit2: Meh.. Just realised it changes.
 
Last edited:
Well I went in today to attempt to do this..

I managed to ghost the data array on the domain controller to a new pair of drives in an array using Ghost 2003. It took 4 hours to do this!

I then removed the original pair of drives and tried to boot.. However it had lost the logical drive of the new pair!

Tried to recreate the array on the new set as that was the only option.. So have lost 4 hours worth of ghosting on to those as that didn't work. Then put the originals back in hoping I could put it back to normal and it had lost the logical drive for those two.. Is there any easy was to recover the arrays? Or am I going to have to just try and recover the data?
 
Well I got one server back up and running, but the TS server is still beating me.

I have ghosted from the OS drive on that to a new RAID 1 array. It has all ghosted OK and all the files are there, however, it refuses to boot to it! Any ideas on how to get it to boot to this array?
 
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