Swap entire disk set between Dell poweredge servers

Solution 1:

I did this recently between two identical HP G5 servers without problems. Hardware-based RAID-controllers who arent stupid saves their logical volume configuration on the disks, so it should not be a problem if you have the same RAID controllers (at the same firmware version).

You should however make sure you have a very recent backup/ghost image of the logical volume before doing this.

Solution 2:

As long as the RAID cards are at the same firmware you should be just find. Dell RAID cards (Re-branded LSI Logic's) store meta data on the drives. Just make sure that you keep the slot assignments the same on the new and old chassis, so:

Old -> New
Slot0 -> Slot0
Slot1 -> Slot1

But i would STRONGLY reccomend you take a full system backup just to be sure.

also this assumes that nothing else has changed besides proc speed i.e. both intel procs, both 64 or 32 bit, etc.

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Solution 3:

The guys I work with call this "Ghost RAID". It works, but it always feels a bit dicey - get out the labelmaker and mark everything before you start. Visualize the process. Practice the physical movements. As long as the destination PERC has no configuration, it should (will) automatically pull the config if the two spindles are in the correct slots. The PERC bios may ask you to import the foreign config, say yes. Even if you don't say yes, I believe it will automatically import it on the second (nth?) boot.

I've actually done this a few times moving spindles between PERC5 and PERC6 controllers, so the firmware matchup advice is a very good idea, but not strictly requrired. Boot volumes also no trouble, so long as both controller models use the same driver package in the OS.

The Dell support folks refer to recovering the RAID config from the disks as "retagging", so maybe do some googling there.

As always, ensure that your backups are GOOD before you do anything else.