Moving Physical and Virtual Disks from One System to Another

This section describes how to move physical and virtual disks from one system to another.

Required Conditions

This section applies to PERC 5/E and PERC 5/i, and SAS 5/iR Controllers

After some planning and preparation, it is possible to migrate physical and virtual disks from one controller, enclosure or server to another. You can perform physical and virtual disk migration on PERC 5/E and PERC 5/i, and SAS 5/iR controllers as long as the following conditions are met.

General Conditions for SCSI and SAS Controllers

Virtual disks can only be migrated to a controller that is using the same technology. For example, virtual disks on a SCSI controller must be migrated to a SCSI controller and virtual disks on a SAS controller must be migrated to a SAS controller. For more information, see RAID Controller Technology: SCSI, SATA, ATA, and SAS.

SAS Controller Conditions

On SAS controllers, you can migrate a virtual disk by moving the physical disks from one controller to another and then importing the foreign configuration on the receiving controller. For more information, see Foreign Configuration Operations.
When moving an enclosure on a SAS controller, you can move the enclosure to any connector number and then import the foreign configuration on the receiving controller. For more information, see Foreign Configuration Operations.

Migrating SAS Virtual Disks to Another System

The following describes how to migrate virtual disks and volumes from one system to another.

1 Turn off the system that the physical disks are being moved from.
2 If the receiving controller does not have a preexisting virtual disk configuration, then turn off its server.
3 Place the physical disks into the new enclosure.
4 Start up the system connected to the receiving controller.
5 Use the Foreign Configuration Operations task to import the migrated virtual disks on the receiving controller.
NOTE: The Foreign Configuration Operations are not supported on PERC S100, S110, and S300 controllers.

The migration is complete. The virtual disk is now manageable through Storage Management.