Adding disks to VA7400 array

[Carl Houseman]

I have a VA7400 populated with 15 73GB drives, which of course has two redundancy groups due to the VA7400 architecture.

I want to connect a DS2405 with 15 36 GB drives to this controller. The DS2405 is currently installed elsewhere and the drives are used as JBOD's (without any array controller).

Questions:
1. Is there anything special I need to do before connecting the DS2405 and attempting to use these drives as part of the VA7400 array? Obviously I don't care about the data currently on the drives.

(For example, I know that the formatting of individual drives is different for a JBOD use vs. VA7xxx use. If something is needed to make the drives appear brand-new/never-used, what might that be?)

2. Will the DS2405 drives be automatically added to the existing redundancy groups? Anything special needed to make that happen?

3. Is there anything I could do to have all of the DS2405 drives get added to just one of the redundancy groups?

thanks,
Carl

[Peter Mattei · Accepted solution]

Yes there are several things to watch out:

1. You do have two redundancy groups one consisting of the odd and one of the even drives. See the attached drawing.
So I would put all 73GB drive in one and all 36GB drives in the other group.
This makes best use of the capacity!

2. To add a DS2405 your VA7400 must be at FW HP14 or higher!

3. You need to set the speed and address switches of the DS2405

Read more in the Service & Upgrade chapter of the HP StorageWorks Virtual Arrays VA 7000 Family Users and Service Guide on
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00311965/c00311965.pdf

Cheers
Peter

[Carl Houseman]

OK, I've got everything put together and the drives are recognized (as seen by the array console) but report "initialization failed". All drives in the DS2405 show orange lights as soon as the array controller comes online.

So I tried the book method of only hot-plugging one drive at a time, and the same thing happens. In the CommandView SDM gui, the condition shows "init failed". If I try to include the drive, it comes up as "unusuable" under Initial State.

The book says if the drives were formatted to 512 byte sectors (they were) that they will be reformatted to 520 byte sectors (they aren't). Any ideas.

[Carl Houseman]

The status of the drive that adding is the same as that reported in this thread
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1057459

Except there's been no unusual power outage. The drive has the same weird serial number ".T.8.T.8.T.8" as reported in that thread.

[Carl Houseman]

And I'll add this... when I try to Include the drive through CommandView (1.09), I get

Unexpected SCSI error
Check Condition on Device /dev/rscsi/c38t12d0 cdb[0] = 0xe0 Req Sense information - SenseCode 0x4 Add SenseCode 0x80 ASC qualifier 0x1f Info Bytes 0
Sense code: 4
Additional SC: 128
ASC Qualifier: 31

This is interesting because the "/dev/rscsi/c38t12d0" is the device name from the former system where this drive was a JBOD.

[Luk Vandenbussche]

Don't forget to check the port speed of your DS2405 (it supports 1, 2 GB) You must change it with a DIP Switch on the controller.

A VA7400 support 1 GB.

[Peter Mattei]

Did you adjust the DIP switches?
Address and speed!

Peter

[Carl Houseman]

For the last two suggestions (FC speed & address), if the FC wasn't communicating properly I wouldn't have the results that I posted.

The problem ended up being due to an interrupted auto-format of drives that had been started by the VA7400. Don't power off your DS2405 or VA 7xxx while it is formatting drives! It will be unable to do anything at all with the drives after that.

Fortunately I still had another DS2405 in another system where I could JBODfmt the drives, and having done that, they could again be auto-formatted in the VA7400-connected DS2405.