Replacing a Damaged Hard Disk on Exadata

You can perform the hard disk replacement on Exadata cellnodes by performing the following checks and steps.

Hard Disks on the cell node are automatically dropped at the time of damage, and the disks of the asm disk groups will also be deleted. After the disk drop operation and after the disk changes, rebalance process will automatically start in ASM disk groups.

Find the Damaged Disk

You can also detect the damaged disk from the alert history output.

Check the Rebalance Operation in ASM Disk Groups

Do not change the disk if there is a running rebalance operation. Wait for the process to finish.

Check the Status of the Disk to be Replaced

Make sure that the Asm Disks on the Damaged Disk are Removed from the Disk Groups

With the following query, you can be sure that there are no asm disks associated with the damaged disk. Because the values ​​in the name column in the v$asm_disk view are in the upper case, use upper case when querying.

Although it is not necessary, it is useful to remove the disk completely from the system with the following command. In some versions, this command may cause a syntax error. If values from the above query returns, the following command must be executed.

Change the Damaged Disk

You can change the disk at this stage. When ejecting the disc, click the button and pull the disk a little and wait for the lights to turn off completely. Then remove the disc completely from the slot.

After the change, you should check the following to see if everything is normal.

After the disk change, the rebalance process will start automatically in asm disk groups. You can increase the power value for shorter Rebalance operation. You can review the article titled “How To Increase ASM Rebalance Processing Speed” for this process.

Make sure Everything Goes Well After the Change

After disk exchange, check that all disks are online with the megacli as below.