Thursday 14 April 2011

HP ProLiant MicroServer – Rebuilding An Array

Okay, so while installing the RAC one of the primary OS drive cradles must have been nudged enough to either disconnect the drive or the tray was not fully seated in the first place.

Either way we ended up with a Critical error on the OS’s RAID 1 array.

The BIOS for the “RAID” at the motherboard level holds no clues to how to rebuild the array once we re-seated the drive.

We booted the server since our experience with software based on board RAID chipset failures require the driver to be loaded and available before a rebuild could be initiated (some Intel on board RAID chipsets are an exception to this rule).

Once into the OS we found the AMD RAIDXpert “console” link:

image

What came up was a Web based console that asked for a username and password. Fortunately the default username and password was right there on the logon page.

Once in we were able to initiate a rebuild of the RAID 1 array:

image

The rebuild time for a pair of 750GB Seagate ES series drives took quite a few hours on this particular box even though there was not a lot of disk action going on via the network.

The Performance tab in the Task Manager during the rebuild process looked like this:

image

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

3 comments:

redskill said...

Hi, just wondering about the HP Microservers power supply, will any 1u server power supply fit in there?
Thanks

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

The HP MicroServer is a pretty specialized box. I doubt that just any PSU would fit.

Philip

Anonymous said...

I was trying to do this. But when i load up RAIDXpert - i get no option to rebuild. Any advice