How to start copy to hotspare manually

I recently had to manually invoke a hot spare in a VNX 5200, but in Unisphere the option was greyed out.

Unisphere_No-CopyToHotSpare

On the CLI the command wasn’t supported. Now what?

CopyToHotSpare_fail

According to https://support.emc.com/kb/184890 the proper command is now

naviseccli -h [ip of one SP] copytodisk [source-disk] [hot spare]

CopyToDisk_Success

Using the “getdisk” command will show you the actual rebuild has started.

Bare in mind that the way to address disks is in the format “Bus_Enclosure_Disk”, so for example 1_2_3 means disk 3 (the 4th disk) in enclosure 2 on bus 1.

In Unisphere you can actually see the progress of the rebuild:

Disk Rebuild in Unisphere

  1. Had to do this recently, I believe though this is not a possibility if the disk in question to be copied is a member of the vault. At least not possible unless you have a lun bound to the Vault. Which is, well never a good idea.

    • Well, in that case, you’ve answered your own concern: never bind a LUN to any of the 4 vault drives. If you really really have to, than do it, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
      I haven’t tried this obviously, but I think what happens is that only the LUN(s) bound to the vault drives will be rebuilt to the available drive and when you eventuelly swap the drive, the actual vault data (if you can call it that) will be rebuilt from the remaining 3 vault drives anyway. What happens to the already rebuilt LUNs to that other drive, I don’t know. That’s actually a good point. Let’s get the question out to the community!

  2. the “copytodisk” cmd isn’t listed within naviseccli. The option in your cmd window is still the valid cli to proactively replace a drive

    naviseccli -h [ip of one SP] copytohotspare [disk position x_y_z] -initiate

  3. You can also [moderated] go into engineering mode [moderated]. This will ungrey the “Copy to Hot Spare” option.

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