We need to rebuild our Dell R610 servers by swapping out all the hard drives with new hard drives that have restored Windows backups on them.
Our tentative plan to accomplish this is to use an offline test server for the builds of the new hard drives. The high-level, general steps we're thinking of doing are:
1) Using PERC and taking the drives offline first, take out the hard drives currently in the test server and put in brand new hard drives. Put the new drives online in the test server and then do a Windows backup (2008 R2) restore onto it.
2) Then take out the newly built hard drives from the test server (using PERC to take them offline first).
3) In the production server to be rebuilt, using PERC just like in steps #1 and #2, take out all the old hard drives, then put the newly built hard drives from the test server into the production server.
Long story short, our hard drives in some of servers need to be replaced with all brand new ones. And this is important. We'd really like to minimize downtime as much as possible. That's why we'd like try to build the hard drives offline FIRST, then quickly as possible swap out the production hard drives with the newly built hard drives.
Is this a workable plan? Is there a better way? We've hot swapped failed drives before which was thankfully easy, but this is a whole complete server rebuild so any tips and guidance is greatly appreciated.
