MSA1000 drive apeears twice in windows disk manager

[Gonzo78]

I have a MSA1000 connected to a BL20p. MSA fimware 4.24. I presented a new logical disk from an array on the msa1000 to the blade server running windows 2003 server. The same disk appears twice in disk manager. Is this a problem with the redundant controllers in the msa? I only have one connection from the blade fibre channel adapter to the san.

[Steven Clementi]

Gonzo:

It sounds like you have no multi path software loaded.

Do you have both fibre ports on the MSA controllers connected to the same switch as the one connection from the Blade Server?

If so, you should remove the B controller fibre port.

Or, do you have the 8 port MSA switches? with them connected to each other? If so, you should remove that connection.

Multipath on the same HBA port is not a supported configuration AND the fact that you can see 2 drives means that your have multiple paths to the same disk which you will need a multipath filter driver for. I suggest MPIO if this is a new system as it is free.



Steven

[Gonzo78]

I have two 16 port switches. Two ports on one switch are connected to two ports on the other switch. I have two msa1000s with redundant controllers. One controller from each msa1000 is connected to switch1 and one controller from each msa1000 is connected to switch2. I have clustered two DL380G2 W2K servers with this configuration for two years without problems. None of the hosts have redundant connections to the san. The problem just started when I presented a disk to a single BL20pG3 2003 server which I plan to cluster. I also have two BL20pG2 2000 servers connected which are not clustered that have been using the san for over a year and work fine. The server having problems reports one drive attached to Bus Number 0, Target ID 1, LUN 2 nad the other drive attached to Bus Number 0, Target ID 6, LUN 2.

[Steven Clementi]

The first problem I see is that you have 2 ISL's between your switches. For an MSA, this is an un-supported configuration.

Are the MSA's the only storage arrays on the SAN?

Can you post a text file with your switch configuration? Telnet to the switch and run switchshow and zoneshow and capture to a file for posting.

Also, can you post a screenshot of your SSP configuration from the ACU?


The simple point is... the new host is seeing the same lun twice. If you are sure you did not configure the same lun on the second MSA, then the host is seeing multiple paths to that single LUN and as configured, is not supported. It is possible to correct the issue through zoning.

Are you the engineer/admin that configued the initial systems?


Steven

[Gonzo78]

Now that we understand how redundant controllers in a MSA1000 work the solution is simple. Unplug the fiber patch cable from the redundant controller since it wasn't going to do anything in our configuration anyway. I don't know why the 2000 servers didn't see the disk presented twice.

[Steven Clementi]

Is there any zoning configured on the SAN Switches? It's possible that the 2000 servers are zoned in a way that only the once controller is able to be seen.


Steven

[Gonzo78]

No Zoning.

[Steven Clementi]

Weird, indeed.