Question : I have CPPM running on a VM and Upgrading it requires dual hard drives.Is it possible to delete the standby drive after the upgrade and attach it again when we need to upgrade again.
Solution:
Deleting the drives on a Production CPPM box is not recommended. However if we have a Eval/Lab setup and the CPPM is running on ESX server, we can delete the standby drive as long as we do not want to roll back to the prior version.
NOTE: It's strongly recommended to take a complete backup of the server before deleting the standby partition.
How do we find which drive is active?
We can get some insight from the system logs.
Navigate to "Administration » Server Manager » Server Configuration" and collect the system logs.
After the log is generated, download it.
Extract the Tar.Gz file and check the below logs and navigate to "cppm-logs<date>\tmpsXXXX\SystemLogs" folder.
1: Grub.conf
2: Mem-info
Under Grub.conf we will see the following.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
title ClearPass Platform 6.1.0.50820
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32-358.6.2.el6.x86_64 ro root=LABEL=/image1 rd_NO_LUKS KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us LANG=en_US.UTF-8 biosdevname=0 panic=30 console=tty0 rd_NO_MD SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 crashkernel=auto rd_NO_LVM rd_NO_DM divider=10 noapic pcie_aspm=off
initrd /initramfs-2.6.32-358.6.2.el6.x86_64.img
title Memory test
root (hd0,0)
kernel /memtest86+-4.10
title Aruba ClearPass 6.2.0.54353 [Active]
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32-359.6.2.el6.local.x86_64 ro root=LABEL=/image2 panic=30 rd_NO_LUKS KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us LANG=en_US.UTF-8 rd_NO_MD SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 crashkernel=auto rd_NO_LVM rd_NO_DM boot=/dev/sda1 divider=10 noapic fips=0
initrd /initramfs-2.6.32-359.6.2.el6.local.x86_64-image2.img
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The string in Bold confirms that Label is Image1 is Active.
Now check the Mem-info log to find Label partition information.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Partition labels:
/dev/sda1: LABEL="/boot" UUID="e5167d25-afc7-411a-bf54-c91904574e90" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda2: LABEL="/vmfirstboot" UUID="975c9c9d-c79f-4b58-8894-f5dbb387618c" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda3: UUID="0e851635-d082-40e1-8372-5ad838026923" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sda5: LABEL="/dummy-second" UUID="fb6867e5-9794-43fc-85d6-be922da1af58" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda6: LABEL="/shared" UUID="3e7582a4-1688-4343-ac7c-a37d61a467d1" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="/image1" UUID="a7509a44-263e-4a9d-8193-b7c826a9e96c" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sdc1: LABEL="/image2" UUID="4ca371a3-2f1c-4278-9a6a-8e121f129b84" TYPE="ext3"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check the names of the partitions.
SDAx - Any Partition starting with SDA, should not be deleted and these are system partitions and contain the Boot programs and Shared information.
SDBx - This partition would be labelled as SCSI 0:0 on the ESX Server.
SDCx - This partition would be labelled as SCSI 0:1 on the ESX Server.
Check the partitions on the ESX server, we would see labels like SCSI 0:0 and SCSI 0:1.
From the above logs, we conclude that the active partition is the SCSI 0:1 (the second partition) and we can delete the other partition : SCSI 0:0.