Tape blade info needed.

[chuckk281]

Davide had a Tape blade issue:

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          I have a customer who has a TapeBlade448c connected to a BL860 i2 running HP-UX.

I need to know if it’s  possible to replace the tapeblade without poweroff the server.

We Tried to do that but OA reports the following warning

May 10 10:43:01  OA: Blade 1 and its partner device need be powered up in a different order.

And the SAS driver went in error :

+ Information for /dev/sasd1:

+ sasmgr get_info -D /dev/sasd1

Driver Name                                        : sasd                

Bundle Version                                     : B.11.31.1009       

Product Number                                     : 013252-001         

Hardware Path                                      : 0/0/0/28/0/0/0     

Health of HBA                                      : OFFLINE            

PCI Vendor ID                                      : 0x1000             

PCI Device ID                                      : 0x0058             

PCI Subsystem Vendor ID                            : 0x103c              

PCI Subsystem ID                                   : 0x3229             

PCI Revision ID                                    : 0x0008             

Hardware Revision ID                               : B3                 

Max. PHYs supported                                : 8                  

Max. IO size                                       : 1048576            

*********************************************************************

*****              HBA Specific information                     *****

*********************************************************************

HBA state                                                             : UNRECOVERABLE      

Driver firmware dump available                     : YES                

Driver firmware dump timestamp                  : Mon May 23 12:35:13

Firmware Revision                                              : 1.23.43.0          

A server reboot fixed the issue.

Any idea?

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Monty answered:

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No partner blade can be removed from the enclosure without first powering off the attached server.  Then the partner blade can be removed or replaced and the attached server can then be powered back on.

The reason for this is – each partner blade (SB40c, Tape Blade, or PCI Expansion Blade) contains a PCI or PCIe adapter, and we do not have hot-plug PCI adapter support in the OSes, so a critical error will be generated if the partner blade is removed while the server is powered on.

Some partner blades have hot-plug devices like disk drives or tapes that can be removed while the server blade is powered on.

The BladeSystem Onboard Administrator implements power sequence logic on all partner blades:

• Upon insertion of a partner blade into the enclosure the OA checks that the adjacent device bay can be properly partnered with that blade – No partner blade can be partnered with another partner blade for instance
• If the adjacent bay is empty – the partner blade will be marked as degraded by the OA until a server blade is inserted
• If the adjacent bay contains a server – the OA checks if that server is already powered-on
  • If the server blade is already powered on, then the partner blade will be marked as degraded due to a power sequencing error
  • If the server blade is powered off, then the partner blade will be powered on and will be marked by the OA as Ok
  • If the server blade that is associated with a partner blade is powered-off, the associated partner blade will be power cycled to ensure the PCI card and attached devices are reset properly

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Questions or suggestions for Davide?