On the way to HA

hfourie · Wed Jul 06, 2011 9:41 pm

Hi all,

How can the following be done please?

I have 2 servers that will be used for HA. However, only 1 system is availible now(which will become the secondary), with the data still sat on the other machine (that will become the primary) This machine is not running StarWind at the moment.

So I want to create some kind of target on the availible system (SAN1), move data to that system, then rebuild the other system(SAN2), make it secondary, and recreate the targets to be HA. I will then do a full sync of the data, and then swap the roles. So the system that had the data on originally(SAN1) will be primary and the other secondary.

Is this possible at all? or does the disk have to be HA from the start. I cant think of another way to do this.

Many Thanks (hope it makes sense)

gymmbo · Wed Jul 06, 2011 10:49 pm

I was in the same/similar situation where I needed to build out one SAN before I could get the second reprovisioned. To my knowledge there is no HA on the fly technology. Naturally the moderators here can best answer this question if I misspeak. The bad news is you will need to disconnect each target/LUN of your current SAN to make it HA. The good news is you do not need to recreate each of the original .img files. When you get to the screen to add the .img files, select the current file in the first field and copy/paste/rename (if necessary) in the second field and then check the Create New box with the matching disk size. Depending on how fast your system responds you can be HA running within minutes.

hfourie · Thu Jul 07, 2011 8:32 am

Thanks for the response. On a seperate test machine, I created a target with a normal .img file. Mounted it, copied data into it. Then I removed the target, and created a new target with HA enabled, and pointed it to the existing .img file. I got a message saying that the img file was not HA compatible and that all data in it will be wiped.

This made me think that an .img file had to be created in HA mode from the start. Or an I doing something wrong?

Constantin (staff) · Tue Jul 12, 2011 2:28 pm

Unfortunately in this case you`ll really lose all your data. HA images have header of special size: 65536, so creating image without it and trying use it for HA will destroy all data on image.

hfourie · Tue Jul 12, 2011 3:13 pm

Hi,

I have just had some info that as long as you created the image with that header size, you will still see the message, but you will NOT losse the data. I have just tried it, and even though I got the message, the data was still intact.

A scary message to see though!

Wed Jul 13, 2011 1:59 pm

We'll fix it in the 5.7 release version, we don't want to scare our users

hfourie · Wed Jul 13, 2011 2:39 pm

Brilliant, thanks.

Max (staff) wrote:We'll fix it in the 5.7 release version, we don't want to scare our users

Wed Jul 13, 2011 6:40 pm

We're doing our best