Procedure: Making drives support protection information

You can use this procedure to migrate drives and arrays to pick up support for protection information.

Drives cannot start using protection information for I/O requests on demand. They must be validated as having a correct format and general support for the function within the code. Lenovo Storage V7000 is capable of validating the format and general support when the drive object is first discovered by the system. The requirement for system validation means that no drive that exists can use protection information on an update from version 730 regardless of use in the configuration. The system can reject a request to make a drive a candidate if the media is not formatted correctly for use with protection information. The process to begin using protection information on an existing drive is to use the system interface (GUI/CLI) and involves unmanaging and rediscovering the drive to allow the software to reacquire the drive characteristics.

The lsdrive view contains the protection_enabled field that shows whether a drive is using protection information. Drives and arrays that exist on an update to version 740 do not automatically pick up support for protection information. All newly discovered drives at this code level support protection information. If the system has spare capacity, then migration can proceed an MDisk at a time. Otherwise, the migration to using protection information on drives must proceed drive by drive.

To migrate a MDisk using spare storage capacity, complete the following procedure.

  1. Migrate data off the MDisk.
    The data migration can be accomplished by MDisk migration as part of MDisk delete (rmmdisk, lsmigrate) within a storage pool. You can also use volume mirroring to create an in-sync mirrored copy of each volume in another pool (addvdiskcopy). When it is copied (lsvdisksyncprogress), delete the original volume copies (rmvdiskcopy), and then delete the MDisk (rmmdisk) that has no data.
  2. When the MDisk is deleted (see lsmigrate), follow the instructions in step 5 for all the drives that are now candidates.
  3. When all old members adopt protection information, re-create the array by using the system interface.
  4. To adopt protection information on an individual drive if the drive is a member, complete the following steps:
    1. Run the charraymember command to eject the drive from the array (either immediately with redundancy loss or after an exchange).
    2. When the drive is no longer a member, follow the instructions in step 5 for candidates or spares.
    3. Repeat for the next member.
  5. If the drive is a spare or candidate, complete the following steps:
    1. Use the management GUI to take the drive offline.
    2. When the drive is offline, use the system interfaces to change the drive's use to unused.
    3. The system reacquires the drive and brings it back online, possibly changing the drive ID.
    4. Use the system interface to change the drive's use to candidate, and then if required, to spare.
    5. Enter lsdrivedriveID and check that the protection_enabled field is yes. This drive can now be used in an array.
Parent topic: Troubleshooting