Forum Discussion

stanleym's avatar
stanleym
Level 2
16 years ago
Solved

Moving half of the disks in a diskgroup to a new diskgroup?

Hi,

I recently installed SFW on a server that already had 16 disks configured as dynamic disks.
During the installation, these 16 disks were converted to a single SFW diskgroup: <hostname>Dg1.

These disks are actually 2 sets of 8 disks, each set contains a RAID0 striped volume.

I would like to move each set of 8 disks to it's own diskgroup.

How can I do this?
(Of course I do not want to lose the data that is on the disks...)

Re,
Stanley.
business continuity
Configuring
Installing
Storage Foundation for Windows
Windows
  • Michael_Black's avatar
    Michael_Black
    16 years ago
     Hi, Stanley.

    If you have the FlashSnap option, you can just right-click on the diskgroup and select "Split Diskgroup." That's the easiest way.

    Otherwise, the only way that I know of would be to simply back up the data from one of the sets of disks, remove them from the disk group, create a new diskgroup, recreate the volumes for those disks and then restore the data from backup.

6 Replies

  • Michael_Black's avatar
    Michael_Black
    Level 4
    16 years ago
     Hi, Stanley.

    If you have the FlashSnap option, you can just right-click on the diskgroup and select "Split Diskgroup." That's the easiest way.

    Otherwise, the only way that I know of would be to simply back up the data from one of the sets of disks, remove them from the disk group, create a new diskgroup, recreate the volumes for those disks and then restore the data from backup.
  • Michael_Black's avatar
    Michael_Black
    Level 4
    16 years ago
     Just a little background: 

    When you upgrade basic disks to dynamic disks using the native windows Disk Administrator (without SFW installed), it automatically puts all of the new, dynamic disks into a single, default diskgroup. The diskgroup just isn't visible to you. After installing SFW, you can now see the diskgroup that was there all along.
  • stanleym's avatar
    stanleym
    Level 2
    16 years ago
    Okay, thanks. That clarifies a lot.

    So I guess that a couple of 'vxdg rmdisk (-k?)' and 'vxdg adddisk (-k?)' statements are not going to work?

    Too bad.

    I'm probably better off assigning 2x8 additional LUN's (it's all EMC DMX storage), creating 2 new diskgroups + volumes and copying the data over to these new diskgroups.
    We actually would like to resize the LUNs to a smaller size anyway so I can do both in one change...
  • Michael_Black's avatar
    Michael_Black
    Level 4
    16 years ago
    My response was assuming that the disks had volumes on them. If the disks do not contain volumes, you can remove them by right-clicking on them and selecting Remove Disk. If they have a volume on them, and you try running the vxdg rmdisk command,  you will receive the following error:

    Failed to complete the operation...
    V-76-58645-598: The specified disk is not empty, operation not allowed.
  • stanleym's avatar
    stanleym
    Level 2
    16 years ago
    Your assumption was correct: I did say I do not want to lose the data that is on the disks...

    I did not try anything on them yet as the system is running production at the moment, so I hadn't even seen the "failed to complete the operation" error.

    I was just hoping there was an easy and supported way to deport the diskgroup, then using some obscure commands to modify the meta data in the private regions of the disks so they can then be re-imported into 2 different groups.
  • Marianne's avatar
    Marianne
    Level 6
    16 years ago
    FlashSnap is still the easiest way. One of it's advantages is diskgroup split and join. If you have SFW Enterprise license, FlashSnap is included, otherwise available as an option.