Compaq ProSignia 200 NetWare 5: At Your Command - Page 15

NetWare 5: At Your Command 15 • Both the START and STOP commands can be used to isolate a single CPU by adding the CPU number that is given by the DISPLAY PROCESSORS command, for example, STOP PROCESSOR 3 or START PROCESSOR 4. Drives and Arrays Tips If you replace all drives in an array with larger capacity drives, the available space on the current volume remains the same with new, extra capacity available as free space. The additional space may be claimed as a new volume or may be combined with the remaining space on the newer drives as a logical drive. Logical drives can then be assigned a new volume or linked to a volume. If the logical drive is linked to a volume, the users will see additional storage space without ever having lost access to the server By adding the space to an existing volume, a single volume can continue to grow virtually without limits. When this procedure is combined with PCI Hot Plug Array Controllers, your storage can be upgraded to additional arrays whenever necessary-without interrupting access to any data on the array. To distribute data to newly added drives, use the Expansion feature of Compaq Online Configuration Utility (CPQONLIN.NLM). When new drives are added to an array, the volumes on that array can be expanded to include the new drives. There's only one catch! If physical drives are added to an array and the array is expanded to include the new drives, the new drives cannot be removed later. It makes sense if you think about it. If you distribute data among all available physical drives in an array, the newly added drives would then contain portions of the data that spans all the drives. Remove a drive and poof! Your data disappears. In any RAID Array, you can substitute any larger drive for any smaller drive. The additional space, however, will not be available until all drives in the array have been upgraded to the larger capacity. In other words, the maximum space available on any array is limited by the capacity of the smallest drive in the array. IMPORTANT: Do not remove more physical drives than the fault tolerance of the array allows. The volume can fail and any information being written to the array will be lost. Remember when loading Compaq custom drivers for drives and adapters, you don't have to use the SLOT= parameter. The new drivers automatically load for each instance of the device that is detected by the system. Some info on partitioning. To easily create multiple partitions under NetWare 5 on a single drive, read further. • NetWare 5 accommodates additional drive space more readily than previous versions by allowing up to four NetWare partitions per drive. • In NetWare 4.x, a partition and volume would have had to be deleted and rebuilt to take advantage of extra free space on a drive. However, in NetWare 5, we can simply create a second, third, or even a fourth partition and assign it a volume without disturbing current disk partitions. • The ability to create additional partitions is particularly useful when upgrading from a smaller physical drive to a larger one. • Since we can create more partitions, simply mirror the smaller drive onto the larger drive. Then create a new volume on the remaining space to reclaim it without having to backup and rebuild the original partition. ECG087.0998