A total of 32 drives were removed from x4 decommissioned HP DL380 G6 servers (eight per server).
The setup of the eight drives per host was into two RAID Groups:
RAID 1 = SLOT 1, 2 = ESXi OS
RAID 5 = SLOT 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 = VMFS Vol (hosting virtual machines)
Unfortunately there is some data that was not backed up prior to the removal of the drives, and now they are all in a pile mixed up.
What is the best way to put these drive back into the hosts without damaging the RAID groups the disks belong to?
Is there a tool that can be used to ready the RAID membership identifier on each drive? Not sure if ACU supports this!
TIA
Danny
Best Answer
Probably the safest thing to do would be to send them all to a company like Kroll OnTrack. They understand the on-disk format of HP's RAID. Since all of the drives are operational, this probably wouldn't be too expensive but you'll have to talk to the right rep to get them to understand what you want: identify and group, but do not recover.
If you have access to a DAS shelf like an MSA 2000, you could load all of the drives in and let the controller auto-detect the existing RAID configuration of the drives. You would need multiple shelves all connected to a single controller to get this to work easily, although you could probably do it with a single shelf and a bit of musical hard drives.