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Re: FC port externally disabled

 
fluidville
Frequent Advisor

FC port externally disabled

I have recently installed a c7000 blade system with 14 460G1 blades, 2 x Cisco MDS 9124e - 24 port fiber switches presenting 2 fiber ports to each blade port 1 sitting on one 9124e and port 2 sitting on another.

I am trying to set up my SAN and require a connection to both fibre ports, I find that the 9124e holding the port 1 fibres seems to work fine, although the cisco 9124e holding the port 2does not bring up all the ports.

Using Cisco Device Manger the status of the port is:

Admin: Up
Oper: down
FailureCause: externallyDisabled

I have windows 2003 on the blade itself and am able to see the 2 qlogic ports presented on device manger, using the SANsurfer utility the second port is seen as down. our SAN is set to support both Loop and point to point. with both mode and speed set to auto.

I am baffled as to why some blades work and others don't.... any ideas would be much appreciated.
6 REPLIES 6
Steven Clementi
Honored Contributor

Re: FC port externally disabled

What bays are your interconnects in?

Also, make sure your hba's are full and/or properly seated. I've seen weird things happen when the card is not fully seated in the connector.

Steven
Steven Clementi
HP Master ASE, Storage, Servers, and Clustering
MCSE (NT 4.0, W2K, W2K3)
VCP (ESX2, Vi3, vSphere4, vSphere5, vSphere 6.x)
RHCE
NPP3 (Nutanix Platform Professional)
fluidville
Frequent Advisor

Re: FC port externally disabled

Many thanks for your response....

I have 2 x 9124e switches using interconnect bays 3 and 4 most of my problems seem to be on bay 4.

You mention reseating the cards, these servers are blades so dont have your tradtional type pci FC cards. it must be noted though that I am able to see both cards in the OS I have on the blade but continue to get the above error on some of the ports on the 9124e. perplexing to say the least.



Steven Clementi
Honored Contributor

Re: FC port externally disabled

"You mention reseating the cards, these servers are blades so dont have your tradtional type pci FC cards."
Right. They have blade Mezz cards... which can still be improperly seated. Trust me, I have seen it.

What bays in the enclosure do you see this problem? is it across the board? or only in specific bays?

Steven
Steven Clementi
HP Master ASE, Storage, Servers, and Clustering
MCSE (NT 4.0, W2K, W2K3)
VCP (ESX2, Vi3, vSphere4, vSphere5, vSphere 6.x)
RHCE
NPP3 (Nutanix Platform Professional)
fluidville
Frequent Advisor

Re: FC port externally disabled

Steve,


Many thanks for your reply, I have managed to solve the problem with a rebbot of the 9124e switch, not ideal but fortunatly the blades where not in production as of yet.

The reload seemed to solve the issues.

Cheers

SBR_1
Occasional Contributor

Re: FC port externally disabled

Hi,

We have exactly the same problem on our site. I've tried everything you can think on the 9124e side and nothing works. We also tried some things on the server side: replacing and swapping the HBA mezzanine cards doesn├в t work, even replacing complete blades doesn├в t work. The problem seems to be fixed to the physical enclosure bay where the blades server resides and/or the incoming ports (internal) on the 9124e, and not to a specific HBA or blade.
Once a port has the status ├в externally disabled├в it will remain that way until a reboot. We had this issue on windows and vmware esx blades, so it doesn├в t seem to be OS related.

Just like you, I found out the only solutions was to reboot the switch. Because we have two 9124e's and fully redundant fabrics that can be done, but of course isn't the best solution.

I noticed to problem only occurs after initial power-up of the enclosure and the blades. We have a lot of c7000 enclosures and we often have this problem after placing new ones. If after initial power-up this problem occurs and you reboot the internal switch, the problem is gone, and even better, it stays gone!

Recently we had a power dip in our lab and that caused the problem to re-occur, so my ├в conclusions├в :
-The problem only occurs after power cycle of the complete enclosure
-It is not OS related, nor is it HBA/blade related: It seems to be fixed to the enclosure bay/port
-It can only be fixed by rebooting the 9124e switch: after this, the problem doesn├в t re-occur
-Only if a complete power-cycle of the enclosure is done, there is a change the problem re-occurs.

We are currently running SAN-OS 3.3(2), but we have also seen this issue with previous versions. I have NX-OS 4.1 in my lab, and haven├в t seen the issue there (yet).

John
Guillaume_L
New Member

Re: FC port externally disabled

Hi,

 

we experienced the same issue and we got over it by reset the server (e-fuse) directly form the active onboard administrator:

 

reset server X (Where X= Bay Number)

 

This will initiate a "powerloss/Reboot" action on the server,all went fine after that and the port on the MDS wasn't disable anymore.

 

Hope it will be helpfull :)