topic Disk drive creation in MSA Storage

Disk drive creation

Demetri — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:59:19 GMT

Do I use disk disk manager in windows to format and create disk drives or HP ACU on MA8000 SAN?

Also the HP ACU does not see the SAN.

Using Windows 2003 and planning to cluster.

Re: Disk drive creation

Uwe Zessin — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 11:16:29 GMT

Not really. The MA8000 uses HSG80 controller modules which are a completely different technology than the Compaq/HP SmartArray controllers.
HSGs are usually managed from a command-line via the serial maintenance port or (if you're a masochist ;-) from a GUI called the StorageWorks Command Console (SWCC).

Do you have a cable for the maintenance port? If not, the first thing you should do is get at least one - you WILL need it some day!

Re: Disk drive creation

Demetri — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 13:03:29 GMT

I have configured the luns for RAID5 using the CLI through the management port on the array controllers. Now I see 12 disks in windows disk manager I have 3 luns two for data and one for the quorum drive. I created basic disks formatted them using disk manager. And everything seems to work, just want to confirm that doing this through disk manager and not a HP utility is the way to do it. I also created the disks with the lowest number disks that are listed in disk manager. Is this the way it's done?

I ran into some problems later when I created some access lists and set the preferred path on the array and ran the qlogic SanSurfer utility after everything was working. I now can't start the cluster and can't see the array. So I am backtracking to see if I did everything the right way. I am suspecting that the order I did things caused the problem. Planning on doing it from scratch again so I would like to confirm some of the steps involved.

thanks

Re: Disk drive creation

Uwe Zessin — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 13:38:08 GMT

It is OK to signature, partition and create the NTFS volumes with Windows tools.

But you should not see more disks than you have created Units on the MA8000. It sounds like you have configured redundant paths, but you are missing a multipath filter. For the MA8000 this is an extra-cost option called 'Secure Path'.

An MSCS cluster will not work properly without multipath filtering and Windows 2003 does not work properly if you configure your MA8000 from MULTIBUS_FAILOVER to a simple (controller-failover) DUAL-REDUNDANCY.

Re: Disk drive creation

Demetri — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:27:11 GMT

The fact that I see 12 drives in windows disk manager is not a correct. Secure path will hide these drives and only show the 3 luns I created?
I am not familiar with Secure path program does the Qlogic Sansurfer utility that controls the dual HBA's in each server do the same thing?

I have the controllers connected to two switches.

sorry for my lack of understanding on this. I received this MA8000 from our Unix group which ran this on Linux and Solaris. And what they showed me may not apply in windows