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Re: MSA1000 Parity and Mirror Initialization problems

 
ColinF
Advisor

MSA1000 Parity and Mirror Initialization problems

I have an MSA1000 storage array running firmware 4.32 build 300. The storage array has 4 LUNs created. 2 are RAID 5 and the other 2 are RAID 0 and RAID 1. The RAID 5 arrays are presented to ESX 3.0.1 servers and the RAID 1 and 0 arrays are presented to a Windows 2003 backup server.

When entering "show units" at the CLI the output shows that both RAID 5 LUNs show "Parity Init Status: 0% complete" and the RAID 1 LUN shows "Mirror Init Status: 0% complete". These LUNs were created a few months ago so I don't think that there is ever going to be any progress. I've raised the rebuild priority to high but that hasn't helped.

My questions are: has anyone seen these problems before? How does this affect the fault tolerance? Anyone have any recommendations?

My next step is likely to upgrade the firmware and restart the MSA but this is part of a 24/7/365 PRD environment. We do notice that the RAID 5 LUNs have poor performance when copying LUN to LUN but users are not complaining. We are planning to move the equipment from the current colo facility to another in the near future so if data is not at risk then I would like to wait until that time to do the firmware upgrade/reboot.

Thanks.
2 REPLIES 2
Rob Leadbeater
Honored Contributor

Re: MSA1000 Parity and Mirror Initialization problems

Hi Colin,

As a first step, I would definitely upgrade the firmware to something supported...

If you check the SAN design guide, you'll see that ESX is only supported in heterogeneous environments when using version 5 firmware.

There are also some performance improvements going to 5.20 so it should hopefully make things better. As you're running a 24x7x52 environment, you've hopefully got dual controllers, so there shouldn't be too much impact doing the upgrade.

Latest SAN design guide is here (page 181)

http://bizsupport.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00403562/c00403562.pdf

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Rob
ColinF
Advisor

Re: MSA1000 Parity and Mirror Initialization problems

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, we do have dual controllers. I read the firmware updating guide and it seems that even with a dual controller configuration we still need to restart the MSA to complete the firmware upgrade so we will need to schedule downtime for the upgrade.

It appears that I need to upgrade from 4.32 to 4.48 then to 5.20, can anyone confirm this?

Anyone know if we are at risk for data loss or are is this just impacting performance?

Thanks.