SAN Follow up

The SQL db to SAN migration didn't go exactly as planned.

I provisioned my storage on the EqualLogic volumes I setup. Once that was done, I installed the iSCSI initiator on the Windows 2000 server and was able to connect to the volumes. I opened up Computer Management/Disk Management but no drives listed at all. ??? DELL had installed it's own Disk Management utility replacing Windows. So, I uninstalled the Dell utility, rebooted...Blue Screen of Death!!! So for the next 2-3 hours I troubleshooted with no luck. Ultimately I ran a Windows 2000 repair to get the server back up.

At this point it's about 5:30am.

Once the server was back up, the Windows Disk Management utility was working. I could connect to the SAN volumes. More problems though aligning the disks which EqualLogic recommends and is generally a best practice.

The EqualLogic documentation referenced using DISKPAR for Windows 2000 and DISKPART for Server 2003. DISKPAR comes with the Windows 2000 resource kit that I did not have and the Microsoft download for the 2000 Resource Kit included DISKPART - which I later found out replaces DISKPAR. A bit of time figuring this all out. Running DISKPART to try and align the disk's resulted in "The arguments you specified for this command are not valid."

By this point my Maintenance Window was over, it's 7am and everything got put on hold at that point. I opened up a support request with EqualLogic the next day. I received a quick call back from an Engineer who said what I could do was mount the volumes on a Windows 2003 server, align them, then dismount and add them back to my Windows 2000 machine. That seemed to work.

Yesterday I spent most of the day quickly detaching our small db's, moving the mdf and ldf files to the SAN volumes and re-attaching with a SQL script. So far so good.

A bit frustrating but everything worked out.

-C