Moving disks

MasterPlan1 · 8 Jul 2009 at 11:55

I'm planning on migrating our FS to Win2k3 64-bit, but to reduce downtime of data, I was thinking of moving the storage from one server to another, it's currently located on SAN, formated as dynamic simple, would I be able to detach this from one box, and simply present it to another, intialise, and set up shares and whatnot?

My boss seems to think that this will trash the data, it would trash it, if I presented it to one server and left it on the other, but I just would like some clarification on it.

Thanks

iaind · 8 Jul 2009 at 12:33

How much data?

Theres no reason it would trash any data, I've done it before but dont even consider it without a backup

You could always use robocopy to synchonise the data onto a new server

MasterPlan1 · 8 Jul 2009 at 12:40

2TBs, I would use robocopy (well, richcopy), but we're lacking in storage to have another 2Tb LUN sitting there.

iaind · 8 Jul 2009 at 13:05

No reason why it wont work but for gods sake make sure youve got a backup

I've done it before, even with spanned/mirrored volumes..

MasterPlan1 · 8 Jul 2009 at 13:26

Yeah, my boss (who used to be a lowly SA like myself) had bad experiance of moving dynamic spanned, but I think the guy who moved the storage left it on the original host, as well as presenting it to the new host at the same time, causing a split brain... And owing to this, he lost his christmas fixing it. So he's cautious about moving storage, no matter how much I say "dude, it's going to be alright!"

And yes, I'm the king of backups, I have in the past, had a dream about backup exec when I was doing a major consolidation of backups and moving loads of crap to b2d. ;(