HP MSA2000sa 3Gb SAS BL Switch Bundle

[BenVC]

Hi,

We are looking to buy a HP blade c3000 with a msa2012sa connected to the sas blade switches in the back of the enclosure, each blade will have a p700m mezzanine card.

1) Product details show for the MSA2012sa support up to 4 hosts. Is this limitation not valid anymore when using the SAS switches? So am I correct that all hosts connected to the SAS switches will see the storage? (blades + future external SAS connections to the switch)

2) We plan installing ESXi on each blade, the systems are certified for this setup. Does anyone have experience with ESXi on blades and a MSA2012sa?

many thanks in advance.

[Casey Rayman]

Re: 1) It certainly works with more than 4 in the configuration you describe. I'm using it with a c7000 enclosure with 7 blades currently. I do not know about other external SAS connections as I am not using any.

[Dnortham]

to answer your question;   on a C3000 you can connect all 8 Blade Bays to the SAS switches; however on a C3000 only the first (4) uplink ports per switch will work.  So your limited to 4 uplink ports per switch for half-height blades. But all of your blades will be able to access the shared storage as long as your using mezzanine slot 2 on your mezzanine card.

(for future individuals)

[Dnortham]

How are people's experience with the MSA2000sa and 3Gb SAS BL Switch Bundle?

I have had several issues where the my blade servers will no longer see the storage paths and I end up- having to re-seat the SAS switches and re-boot the blade servers.  

I am having a current issue where occasionally A  bladebay will loose it's zone assignment and when I try and add the bladebay back to it's perspective zone  "bb 1 add zg=zone1" I get a Operation Not supported message.

I've had enclosures down for numerous days and then one day it just starts working again;  HP engineering taking the stance I'm the only one having this isssue and fix is to keep re-seating and rebooting OA's , Sas Switches, MSA controllers until it starts working.

So just seeing if I can get some feedback to other peoples experiences.

[Dnortham]

l have found that with the issue where blade servers in a C3000 will no longer see the storage paths occur and I have verified that the zone assignments for the blades have been dropped, the fastest way to recovery is to "reset switch configuration" and then re-zone. I'm running firmware version 2.2.4.