My Exchange server 2003 crashed

[Joeteck]

I still don't believe that, the fact you were able to just make a copy of the array no problem but it kept locking up on boot. I've been working with raid and controllers for many many years and the situation you described is 99% of the time bad controller ram.


Did you check smart status on those drives and run diags on them?? Its rare for enterprise drives to fail that quickly, and all enterprise drives do a KILLER good job of reporting problems, perhaps the monitoring you were in control of was inadequate.

Life as a administrator

Well, guess what, your wrong! Know how I know? I have no RAM on the controller. hahaha!

I've been working with RAID & controllers for many years too... 18 years as a network administrator to be exact and the President / CEO of my own PC repair company.

I don't have time to check the status of the drives when my goal is to get the server up and running. Incidentally it took four hours to do so... The drives have major issues... They already have an RMA number and ready to be replaced in a few weeks.

When I ran Diskeeper and analyzed the array it took about 15 seconds to display. Normally a nanosecond! And when I clicked to defrag, that's when it froze, because its trying to keep the mirror intact. Since it could not write to the other disk, it locked up. One disk was ok and booted into windows slowly, but still had issues.. So before I could not boot any longer, I chose to image the drive before I lose the entire server...

 

[Xaotic]

This SCSI (29320ALP-R) card only has one port, which is all you need. Because you can have 15 drives. When you're on a budget you have to make sacrifices, and I had very little money to do anything radical. So I picked two of these, and setup two RAID 1 arrays.. Boot and Information store. Its very fast and fits my business model perfectly. I built this 3 years ago... Things have changed!

EDIT: I may setup two RAID 10's in the near future... four drives each.

I know the budgetary constraint issue well and things have changed tremendously. SCSI is largely history in medium to large enterprise. I still have a few systems running U320, but most are either SAN or SAS.

That's a good option for a RAID level for performance and redundancy.

I didn't know whether you were running SAS, so ports are of course moot.

You are probably aware of all of these, but more for general information. The Adaptecs management is similar to many others and it gives an insight into configuration for high availability.

If the case has room, you can add spares to the arrays. Details are in the pdf manual, 4-11.

http://download.adaptec.com/pdfs/user_guides/ULTRA320_UG_EN.PDF

Email notifications(and/or SNMP) can be set up in the Adaptec Storage Manager software. page 99.

http://download.adaptec.com/pdfs/us...ger_v5_Users_Guide_for_Internal_RAID_0207.pdf

 

[EarthDog]

I certainly hope you tried to get the newest back up you could but still had the nightly incremental available.....otherwise "Best Practices" are not being adhered to where you work...be careful, that could mean your job! That wouldnt fly at all in a major corporation, and if you are currently in a large company, your management should be fired for inproper risk management and mitigation in regards to your backup policy and strategy if you didnt have that nightly full/inc. You got lucky you didnt lose any information!!

 

[Joeteck]

I certainly hope you tried to get the newest back up you could but still had the nightly incremental available.....otherwise "Best Practices" are not being adhered to where you work...be careful, that could mean your job! That wouldnt fly at all in a major corporation, and if you are currently in a large company, your management should be fired for inproper risk management and mitigation in regards to your backup policy and strategy if you didnt have that nightly full/inc. You got lucky you didnt lose any information!!

I have full buckups of everything! The image was the quickest way to get back online... And a backup is only good if the OS in intact.

 

[pik4chu]

I know the budgetary constraint issue well and things have changed tremendously. SCSI is largely history in medium to large enterprise. I still have a few systems running U320, but most are either SAN or SAS.

That's a good option for a RAID level for performance and redundancy.

I didn't know whether you were running SAS, so ports are of course moot.

You are probably aware of all of these, but more for general information. The Adaptecs management is similar to many others and it gives an insight into configuration for high availability.

If the case has room, you can add spares to the arrays. Details are in the pdf manual, 4-11.

http://download.adaptec.com/pdfs/user_guides/ULTRA320_UG_EN.PDF

Email notifications(and/or SNMP) can be set up in the Adaptec Storage Manager software. page 99.

http://download.adaptec.com/pdfs/us...ger_v5_Users_Guide_for_Internal_RAID_0207.pdf

hate to nitpick but SAN and SAS are not in the same category. one is a drive type the other is a system type ie, SANs can have SAS drives in them, or SCSI, etc.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.

 

[EarthDog]

I have full buckups of everything! The image was the quickest way to get back online... And a backup is only good if the OS in intact.

You can do full's (include OS) on weekends and incrementals M-F. Restore from the full OS/Root b/u thrn incrementals on up. Good thinking on the fly though.

Shocked you dont use veritas or tivoli. I had no idea acronis was acceptable for an enterprise solution!

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

Acronis has enterprise level products, i am curious to know how good they are as i was looking into them myself for doing workstation imaging weekly.

 

[Joeteck]

You can do full's (include OS) on weekends and incrementals M-F. Restore from the full OS/Root b/u thrn incrementals on up. Good thinking on the fly though.

Shocked you dont use veritas or tivoli. I had no idea acronis was acceptable for an enterprise solution!

I'm the Director of Information Technology!

What ever fits our budget and works.....Works!!! lol.

Acronis works very well... Detects SCSI... which is a home run in my book!