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We are currently dismissing a Windows 2008 Server from production, and I'm planning to use it for some testing jobs; however, there is a possibility that in a few months we'll need it online again for a few days in case some migration job has had some problems.

My idea was to simply put aside its disks and do my test jobs with some fresh ones; in case of emergency, I could simply put back in the old disks and have my "old" server back.

Now, this would work transparently for a "regular" desktop machine; however, this server has a Dell PERC 6i RAID card, with the old disks configured in RAID 1 (and probably the new ones as well).

Do I need to perform some kind of backup of the RAID configuration to be able to quickly put the old disks back online and restart the "old server" seamlessly, or is it somehow handled automagically by the controller? (i.e. the RAID configuration is already stored on the disks and is reimported automaticaly when they are put back into the controller)

Matteo Italia
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Your plan would most likely work out just fine. The PERC controller will recognize the configuration data on the old drives, warn you of a "foreign configuration" on boot (which interrupts the boot process). You will want to import the foreign configuration when prompted (do not clear it, or it may be difficult to regain access to that data). After importing, you should be all set!

JimNim
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  • Thank you, that's what I expected, but I wanted some confirmation before risking troubles if (=when :-) ) the emergency hits. – Matteo Italia Aug 02 '16 at 17:19