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Set Hot Spare on NetBackup 5200

Affinity
Level 3

Hi. I need to set the Hot Spare to a different disk in a NetBackup 5200. The below article refers to a KB article 000013307 that has an instruction of how to do so. I can't seem to find the article anywhere? Does anybody know how I might get access to the article or have an instruction on how to change the hot spare?

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.100007471.html

Thanks in advance.

 

16 REPLIES 16

sdo
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Why do you need to ?

We replaced the Raid Card in the device and now drive 16 doesn't show as spare. So want to set it. See attachment

andrew_mcc1
Level 6
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Are you sure its a NetBackup 5200? Those units went End of Sale early 2012 and End of Support was January 2017.

Andrew

sdo
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You've said what you want to do... but not why.

Why does it matter to you which spindle is the hot spare ?

Oh yes. It indeed a 5200! And we have no support available as you say. Which is why we having lots of issues fixing!  

It actually doesn't matter which but as you can see from the attachment no disk is showing as spare at the moment.

sdo
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Well, Veritas must have pulled the tech note / instructions for a good reason - so you are out of luck there...

...but...

...at your own risk... and I take no responsibility whatsoever...

...AFAIK - the RAID cards in those old applianceswere OEM from LSI, and so they use the MegaCLI command set... BUT... I could well be wrong...

...yet...

...the version of MegaCLI in that appliance may be very old... and so it may be very different to the documentation for modern versions of MegaCLI...

...anywhere - here's a taster :

https://community.cisco.com/t5/security-documents/megacli-common-commands-and-procedures/ta-p/311454...

.

IMO - my advice to you is this... leave the hot-spare where it is.  It doesn't make any actual difference which disk is the hot-spare.   If you take the risk of messing with MegaCLI then you are taking a risk with the backup data.  Has your customer / manager / director approved you taking such risks with their data ?

sdo
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unconfigured good = spare

spun-up = hot

...so you do have a hot spare.

Oh. the fact that it wasn't green ticked making me think that there was an issue? Also, I thought it alway set disk 16 as spare?

sdo
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the hot-spare will move around the set as and when failed disks are replaced.

andrew_mcc1
Level 6
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This is all good advice. Personally I would not use this system for anything important. Even if you get things working using underlying commands etc. you run the risk the NetBackup Appliance software falls over because something now isn’t the way it expects. Also you are way out of support for NBU s/w, but you probably know all this...

Andrew

sdo
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Well... as ever... it turns out I was wrong... and that "unconfigured good" does not mean "hot spare".

Here's some useful reading about disks in appliances :

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.100012488

...and here's an example of setting a disk as "hot spare" :

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.100025763

Sorry about that. :\

No need to apologies. You have been most helpful.

I was going to ask you for clarification as I did see those articles also as per this article

https://www.veritas.com/content/support/en_US/article.100027619.html

“The normal status of the Hotspare disks belonging to Storage Shelves will be displayed as 'Hotspare, Spun Down'.”

I may have to run the commands on disk 3(don’t really want to do this ) to set it as a hot spare now but it is also showing as “Spun up” which it shouldn’t be so hopefully this will also change the status to Spun down.

This issue all started when we changed the RAID controller because it was faulty.

I can only assume the reason that the status of these disks changed was that we replaced the Raid controller.

Before the change, the status of the first 15 disks was showing as “online, Spun up” with disk 16 showing as” Hot Spare, spun down” (see attached screenshot)

Now it shows disk 10 an unconfigured good, spun up and disk 16 as “online, spun up” but both have a yellow exclamation mark. Any ideas best why this is happening and how the best way to fix it?

sdo
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Yes, it would seem that you will have to run at least one or two commands to make at least one of the disks a hot spare.   Those two screen shots you have posted, one is from the CLIsh and the other from Appliance web management GUI by the looks of it.  Right now does the CLIsh view show drives 10 and 16 as being in a warning state of some sort ?  I wonder if the web management GUI is only showing the drives as yellow because the web management GUI is hard-coded to expect to see a hot-spare in slot 16 - maybe ?

The crucial thing right now is to determine whether the parity group is good, and whether RAID-6 is fully protected.  Does it look healthy to the CLIsh ?

As for getting the spindles to show green in the GUI, then the only thing that I can suggest is to spend some time researching MegaCLI commands to somehow bring drive 10 back in to the parity group - but to do this you will likely have to manually (logically) mark drive 16 as bad, and then bring drive 10 in to the parity group - and then after several hours when the parity group rebuild is finished to then mark drive 16 as good, and then mark drive 16 as hot-spare.  Several vendors, such as HP, Dell, Hitachi, etc all use rebadged LSI cards - and so there will be plenty of good examples of MegaCLI commands online.

Just to update the thread we managed to Set disk 10 as a hot spare.

We did the following

First scanned for disks in ‘foreign’ state  ./MegaCli64 CfgForeign – Scan -a0

1 detected (10). That explains the ‘unconfigured’ state.

Cleared foreign state ./MegaCli64 ./MegaCli64 CfgForeign – Clear -a0

Success

Set disk 10 as hot spare ./MegaCli64 -pdhsp -set physdrv[59:10] -a0

Success

GUI updated to show disk 10 as a hot spare. Shows state as spun up.

The warnings, however, are still present on disk 10 & 16. I am not sure if this will just take time for the GUI to update?

All shows well in the CLIsh but not the GUI. Which is annoying as it showing alerts on the dashboard of the device.

 

sdo
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Well done on your steps. :)    And thanks for the update.

I guess it does seem as if the appliance GUI is hard-coded to expect to see drive 16 as the hot-spare.