topic Re: How to replace all drives on an aggregate in Active IQ Unified Manager Discussions

How to replace all drives on an aggregate

theonetruepath — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 05:32:09 GMT

I have a FAS2020 with 12 drives, running OnTap 7.3.6. Six drives are owned by each controller. The drives are set up as a single aggregate on each controller.

I have migrated all the data off controller B's aggregate (onto a spare Netapp) in order to allow all six drives to be replaced with bigger drives.

The tricky part is

1. The site is remote and anything I get done is by an electrician

2. I have to destroy the root volume as there is only one aggregate. I will have no spare volume to 'park' the root volume data while I replace the drives.

3. There is no console cable up at site

Is there a way I can do this remotely without having to plug in a console cable and run through the setup wizard?

Thanks for your help...

Patrick

Re: How to replace all drives on an aggregate

aborzenkov — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 07:35:35 GMT

Do you use RAID4 or RAID_DP? Do you have spare drives on another controller?

Re: How to replace all drives on an aggregate

theonetruepath — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 07:42:26 GMT

Each controller has one spare, and the aggregates are both RAID_DP

I tried to create a new RAID4 aggregate using the two spares (after reassigning ownership of the other spare) but was blocked because the system said there would be insufficient spares for the new aggregate. I don't know how to 'borrow' a parity drive from the existing (almost empty) aggregate.

Re: How to replace all drives on an aggregate

aborzenkov — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 07:51:47 GMT

You still should be able to create new aggregate, may be using -f option if necessary. You can convert aggregate into RAID4 (aggr options raidtype), but I would not do it. It is not needed and RAID_DP without spares provides better protection during data migration than RAID4 + spare.

Re: How to replace all drives on an aggregate

theonetruepath — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 07:55:51 GMT

I don't need to protect/migrate any data (apart from the tiny bit of root volume data) as it's already all migrated to the spare SAN, so I'm happy to convert the aggregate into RAID4.

Also, I was using the GUI to create the new aggregate, it sounds like you are saying I can do it using the command line, then I can use the '-f' option to force it?

Re: How to replace all drives on an aggregate

aborzenkov — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 08:02:35 GMT

I was not even thinking about GUI - I never do anything like this with it.

Oh, and do you have BMC connection? Then you would have remote access to console and could perform system initialization remotely.

Re: How to replace all drives on an aggregate

theonetruepath — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 08:21:34 GMT

Ah so that's what BMC is. Site doc suggests that there is a BMC IP on which I can connect. Unfortunately the site link just went down so I can't check. That would make it easier.

Thanks for the pointers.