Re: Disk upgrade with no downtime - possible?

Disks in a RAID set have to be all the same size.

Theoretically, you could stop RAID. (which gives you 1 drive's worth
of space back).
Remove a drive, Add a drive
repeat 4 more times.
Start RAID.

However, as far as I know you have to do a manual IPL to DST to stop RAID.

So you could limit your downtime, but not eliminate it.

Charles

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 10:29 AM, Pete Helgren <Pete@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Seems like I have either asked or seen this before but I am planning to
upgrade 5 out of 10 disks allocated to an LPAR which is currently at
86%.  My goal is to hopefully replace the drives while the partition is
active so the question is: Can I replace the drives one at a time and
just allow RAID-5 to rebuild the drives?

The info center for V5R4 says this:

"A disk unit that is running with device parity protection can be
exchanged only if it has failed. A disk unit running with device parity
protection cannot be replaced with a non-configured disk even if it has
failed."

So it sounds like I *can't* do it.

Any pointers here?  Seems like I should be able to just replace each
disk one at a time and let then it rebuild before replacing the next
one, but having only replaced truly failed drives, I am in uncharted
territory.

The existing drives are model 4326  type 072 (30GB) and I plan to
replace them with 4327 (70GB).  V5R4M0 9406 520

Pete




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