RE: Disk reconfiguration for upgrade

First of all the 6717 is a 8.58GB drive.  When you RAID 5 a set, each
drive is partitioned to hold data and striping for the other drives.
That is why different configurations report different disk sizes.  You
will need a larger drive for your OS.  Seems you do not need more
storage since you are at only 57% so I would go with the 17.5Gb drives.
They will work up to V5R3, I do not know the requirements for V5R4 or
beyond. 

In order to stay protected, you will need have at least 4 drives of the
same size.  I would remove RAID from the set of 4 and then tell the
system to stop using them.  This can all be done live, but you will be
unprotected for a day or so.  If you can afford down time, you can do
your backup in restricted state and start the data move while still in
restricted state.  You can then IPL to DST and remove the 4 drives,
insert the 4 new drives, build a raid set, add to ASP, and finally
migrate the load source.

This is where I become unclear as to weather you need to physically move
the load source back to the same slot as the original or not.  Perhaps
someone more experience can chime in.


Christopher Bipes
Information Services Director
CrossCheck, Inc.

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Shaun Pearson
Sent: Friday, June 16, 2006 7:31 AM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Disk reconfiguration for upgrade

Any advice please

We are looking to upgrade OS on our 270 (currently V5R2)

We believe we need a larger disk for our load source in order to do
this, and are looking at moving to 17.5gb or 35gb disk drives.

Our current disk config is as follows :

Parity Set 1
4 * 6.4gb 6717

Parity Set 2
8 * 7.5gb 6717 (including load source)

Physically we  have 2 * 6 slot units. Both currently full.
The first unit contains 4 drives from Parity Set 2 (including the load
source) and 2 from Parity set 1
The second unit contains 4 drives from Parity Set 2 and 2 from Parity
set
1

Current disk usage is 57%

Is it possible, by some combination of removing existing drives,
switching off parity, adding the new larger drives, to move load source
to the larger disks whilst avoiding full restore ?