Phew, close one, you gotta love technology
jibbajabba
Member Posts: 4,317 ■■■■■■■■□□
in Off-Topic
A colleague of mine was building a server for a customer.
As he just physically built it, but not the OS etc., my manager asked me to test whether the onboard SAS controller is recognized by ESXi. It wasn't on the HCL, but sometimes it is still working which would be fine for a dev box ...
Anyway, we both thought the guy didn't do anything with the server, so without any further testing, I took out the Adaptec raid card, re-cabled the backplane to use the onboard SAS, fired it up, created a Raid 10 (onboard is LSI fakeraid) and went ahead to install ESXi. Well, I tried, it didn't recognize the array. Which turned out to be my luck.
Colleague comes back in the office to pickup the server .. Manager and myself looking at each other .. asking him "errr... you finished it?" .. answer : yea - last night from home ..
D'OH .....
Err ..this was for a specific customer which used the whole shebang, Oracle and whatnot ....
Well ... seeing my evening running away, I tried one last thing ... Adaptec card back and surely it didn't see any logical drives ...
Then I asked him which exact arrays he had built ... so I re-done the raid arrays with the exact same sizes ... and bang ... server up and running ...
Result ...
So THANK F* GOD that bollocks LSI controller didn't wipe the disk but also just add the infos to the metadata ...
So even if you destroy the metadata of an Adaptec array, initialize the disks, create a new array config with different sized and whatnot, as long as you re-create the same array with the exact size down to the MB, it is all back to normal ... well unless of course you write data onto the disk ...
Evening saved
As he just physically built it, but not the OS etc., my manager asked me to test whether the onboard SAS controller is recognized by ESXi. It wasn't on the HCL, but sometimes it is still working which would be fine for a dev box ...
Anyway, we both thought the guy didn't do anything with the server, so without any further testing, I took out the Adaptec raid card, re-cabled the backplane to use the onboard SAS, fired it up, created a Raid 10 (onboard is LSI fakeraid) and went ahead to install ESXi. Well, I tried, it didn't recognize the array. Which turned out to be my luck.
Colleague comes back in the office to pickup the server .. Manager and myself looking at each other .. asking him "errr... you finished it?" .. answer : yea - last night from home ..
D'OH .....
Err ..this was for a specific customer which used the whole shebang, Oracle and whatnot ....
Well ... seeing my evening running away, I tried one last thing ... Adaptec card back and surely it didn't see any logical drives ...
Then I asked him which exact arrays he had built ... so I re-done the raid arrays with the exact same sizes ... and bang ... server up and running ...
Result ...
So THANK F* GOD that bollocks LSI controller didn't wipe the disk but also just add the infos to the metadata ...
So even if you destroy the metadata of an Adaptec array, initialize the disks, create a new array config with different sized and whatnot, as long as you re-create the same array with the exact size down to the MB, it is all back to normal ... well unless of course you write data onto the disk ...
Evening saved
My own knowledge base made public: http://open902.com 
Comments
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astorrs
Member Posts: 3,139 ■■■■■■□□□□
This holds true for most RAID controllers as well (not just Adaptec). And a good trick for others to remember.So even if you destroy the metadata of an Adaptec array, initialize the disks, create a new array config with different sized and whatnot, as long as you re-create the same array with the exact size down to the MB, it is all back to normal ... well unless of course you write data onto the disk ...