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Or I should have called this creative use of Microsoft software mirroring ! I have stuffed around with this for a while now and found something this morning that works. WASP is our big daddy server that does just about everything, it is also 6 years old and I really do not want to reinstall it, there is just too many things that you can miss or have go wrong, so …… As you all should know, Windows is fairly forgiving about moving from one motherboard to another AS LONG as the hard disk controller is the same, if it is different, say one was VIA and the other Intel it will just blue screen, there are ways around this but they are a bit complex and require that you can physically connect the old hard disks to the new server

What I am doing is taking a 6 year old HP Netserver 700Mhz dual Xeon PIII, HP RAID, 8 x 18Gb SCSI hardsisks, Windows 2003 and moving the O/S “as is” to a new server based on an Intel Serverboard 7525RP with 2 x 3Ghz Xeon, Adaptec 2820SA 8 port SATA II RAID controller with 2 x 250mb hard disks mirrored.

Option 1) Backup and restore, forget it, a waste of time, for same hardware to same hardware even I have never had much luck with this. Not a real option. Last resort.

Option 2) Put the WASP RAID controller into new server with SCSI hard disks attached and powered by old server, try to boot new server with old hard disks, mirror old hard disks to another hard disk in the new server, remove old hard disks and boot off new hard disk. Well, this sounds complex but I have actually done this once with an IBM RAID. But (and there is always a but) it does not always work, I took an old HP server almost the same model as WASP with a HP RAID card, put it into a new server and I could not get it to boot, so I gave up on this one. This one also might introduce a lot of downtime and can be a bit scary with 2 meter long SCSI cables going from one server to the other.

Option 3) a brainwave I had one night at 3 AM, tested and works, should work in just about any situation..  This would probably work with a SATA PCI card but we had an Adaptec 1200A which is a 4 port Highpoint IDE RAID card, in this case I was just using it as an add-in IDE controller as you can’t always hook up a hard disk to the on board IDE controller on HP servers. Plus, any add in IDE controller or SATA controller will be treated by Windows as a SCSI controller, this is important.

1)1)      1) Attach a hard disk that is larger than all the space on the server you want to backup to the add in controller. My test server I am trying to replace had 8 x 18Gb SCSI hard disks, 1 x 18Gb mirror and 1 x 70Gb RAID 5 volume. Or about 90Gb, so I used a 160Gb Samsung IDE drive.

2)      2) Install the card in the old server with the drive attached and power up.

3)      3) See if you can see the new drive OK. The Adaptec 1200A has the advantage that Windows 2003 knows what it is and does not need drivers, it just works.

4)      3) Start software mirroring your volumes in logical order (ie c: then e: etc ) to the new hard disk, what you are doing here is software mirroring already hardware mirrored volumes  !

5)      4) When that’s done you now have a copy of everything that was on the old server spread over 8 hard disks on one hard disk, shutdown the old server and pull out the card and hard disk.

6)      5) Install the card and hard disk into the new server, do not at this stage install any other new controller you might want to install, we just want to get it to boot.

7)      6) Turn it on and it should boot, in my case I had to disable on board SATA before I could get this to happen.

8)      7) Let it come up and install any drivers you might need to install, in my case I only had to install the network drivers.

9)      8) Open disk manager and break mirrors and delete missing drives.

10)   9) Reboot and let it come up clean, check everything is OK. At this point this server will do everything the old would have if networking is up and you have given the server the same IP number etc. In a production environment if you got this far your downtime would have only been about 5 minutes or so, once to install controller in old server, then once again to shut down old server then bring up new server. Of course I don’t need to state at this time that bringing up the old server is a very bad idea. While the machines are software mirroring they can still be used.

11)   10) Shutdown one more time the new server, install my Adaptec 2820SA RAID card, attach 2 drives

12)   11) Start up the new server, create 1 x 250Mb mirrored volume.

13)   12) Boot the server into O/S.

14)   13) Check you can see your new volume, if so start software mirroring volumes in logical order to the hardware mirror volume.

15)   14) When that’s done shut down and remove the IDE drive

16)   15) Now the fun part, mine would not boot until I re enabled the on board SATA even though nothing is attached to them, once I did that the server came up, everything was working and running just as on the old server.

17)   16) Open disk manager and again drop all the software mirrors and delete missing drives. Mission accomplished.

And the best part ? if it doesn’t work out you simply shut down the new server and fire up the bold one again, you lose nothing, then back to the drawing board.