topic Please help! VA7100 Failure in Disk Enclosures

Please help! VA7100 Failure

Kurz — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 16:56:06 GMT

Hi,

today our VA7100 crashed.
armdiscover does not see the array, neither does armdsp work.

A serial console on the controller says that the EVA is in a warning state:
Redundancy Loss
Rebuild Failed
Non Redundant Disk Access

One LED on a disk is yellow, and the VA LED is also yellow.

armdsp -f says all disks are included. Only the Main Enclosure is in a Warning State.

The question is: Can we make things worse by removing the - probably defective - disk? (I need to look for a filler then, I suppose.)

If it is just a disk problem, then why is the communication with the host down?

best regards,

M. Kurz

Re: Please help! VA7100 Failure

Andy_Stor — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:07:28 GMT

Could you attach the output of armdsp -a from the Serial console? Rebuild might fail if there is no free space available for the array to rebuild the data. If all the disk are showing online then we should look at the armlog as there might be a disk which might be going on/off on the loop.

Andy.

Re: Please help! VA7100 Failure

Kurz — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:52:28 GMT

Hi Andy,

thanks for your reply. HP support gave me a hint, that might be useful for others, too:

Pulling the controller from the VA shelf for about 30 seconds interrupted the hang. As there are 2 controllers, the other one takes over.

There was no data loss (we have no write cache anyway), at least nothing that Oracle wasn't able to deal with.

The VA started a friendly looking light show, and even the bad disk suddenly was back to green (the disk had not been touched). The warning state had gone.

I had to run ioscn -fn on the attached hosts, otherwise the volume groups could not be mounted.

Of course, the disk will be changed, but that seems to be it. I wanted to pull the disk and put it back in, but I wanted reassurance in this case.

I couldn't provide any output, because it was just an old serial terminal at that moment.

Thanks for your help,

M. Kurz