Bring A Dell PowerVault MD3000i Disk Online From The Command Line
When two drives in a RAID 5 array going offline, so goes your data. If this happens, hopefully the disks are not truly failed but simply offline for some reason. This was the case with a client recently. For some reason when we put new drives in the Dell PowerVault MD3000i it took 2 drives in a RAID 5 array offline which took down a virtual machine that resided on that datastore.
If you have more than one drive offline and simply re-insert those drives they will still show as failed and will not come back online and rebuild if necessary. Instead you can force the state of the drive back to good condition which will bring them back online, after which the SAN can determine which disks if any needed to be rebuilt.
Below is the command to bring slot 12 in enclosure 0 back online. You will need to modify it according to what disks have failed, if more than one drive has failed re-run the command a second time and change the drive number. If you have one or more MD1000 connected to your MD3000i you will also need to change the enclosure number (in this case 0) to the correct number.
C:\Program Files\Dell\MD Storage Manager\client>smcli -n "<Storage Array Name>" -c "revive physicalDisk [0,12]";
After this command is run the drive should come back online and hopefully your data will be intact.
Syntax check complete.
Executing script...
Script execution complete.
SMcli completed successfully.
Bring A Dell PowerVault MD3000i Disk Group Offline/Online
If you need to take a disk group offline you will need to do it via the command line, you can't do it in the Modular Disk Storage Manager.
The Storage Array Name can be found by opening the Modular Disk Storage Array and it will be at the top left hand corner. The syntax is case sensitive so make sure the storage array name is correct.
The disk group (in this case [3]) will also change depending on which disk group you need to take offline. To find your disk group number click the 'Disk Groups & Virtual Disks' link from the Summary tab of the Modular Disk Storage Manager.
Run the command below, it will check the syntax, execute the script, and let you know if it completes successfully. Once you have taken the disk group offline, physically remove the drives then re-seat them and run the second command (almost identical to the first) to bring it back online.
C:\Program Files\Dell\MD Storage Manager\client>SMCli -n <Storage Array Name> "set diskGroup [3] availability=offline;"
Performing syntax check...
Syntax check complete.
Executing script...
Script execution complete.
SMcli completed successfully.
C:\Program Files\Dell\MD Storage Manager\client>SMCli -n <Storage Array Name> "set diskGroup [3] availability=online;"