MSA1000 will not create new LUN with 300GB drives

[Dave Thompson_5]

We're recently added a third MSA30 shelf with 14 300GB disk drives. When attempting to create a new LUN (unit) with the new drives, I get a warning stating the physical drives are different sizes, plus the error message, "Add Unit failed: Cannot create unit with given parameters!"

I can create a new LUN with nine or fewer physical drives, however 10 or more fails. In either case, I still get a warning about the physical drives being different sizes.

Details of the MSA1000 drives, the offending command, and firmware versions are listed in the attached text file.

Are the 300GB drives supported on our current version of firmware? Or, is a F/W upgrade for the MSA1000 in my future?

[Uwe Zessin]

Dave,

> Logical Unit size = 3147116 MB

Apparently, you have hit the 2 TeraByte SCSI LUN limit. It's a 32-bit counter, so 2^32 (=4,294,967,296) blocks * 521 Byts/block = 2,199,023,255,552 Bytes.

You can put all disk drives in one disk drive array and put two logical disks into this array, but this will result in two LUNs which need to be combined on the host.

[John Kufrovich]

Dave
You can use the 14 300G drives. If using cli, you will have to explicitly call out the size.

Can you use the same cmd but add a size value.

size=2097151MB

[Dave Thompson_5]

Thank you for the replies. Two 2TB LUNs on the array shelf will work instead of one 4TB LUN becasue of the 2TB LUN size limit thing.

However, the "WARNING: The physical drives assigned to this unit are different sizes.
If the unit is created, 10% or more of the total space will be wasted!" message I get when creating the LUN still concerns me.

Is this message valid? Is 10% of the total space really wasted? I don't recall getting this message when I created a 2TB LUN with 146.8GB drives.

[John Kufrovich]

Guess, I didn't catch that error warning in your previous msg. This is a first.

For duplication, what is your MSA configuration. Are the 14 300G drives in the MSA1000 enclosure or MSA30 enclosure.
Run cli cmd>show versions
Supply this information.

Thanks,

[Dave Thompson_5]

The 300GB drives are on the recently added MSA30. Requested info is in the text file attached to this message. Also included in the file is output from a "show disks" command, "add unit" command, and "show units" command.

I realize my f/w is probably in need of upgrading but I'm reluctant to do that because of the cascading effect of having to upgrade f/w on fiber switches, CASA, and HBAs.

Thanks.

[otto warlich · Accepted solution]

Hello Dave,

Your information tells that you have Firmware version 2.38,
You need to upgrade this to 4.48.
See the HP website.

With regards,

Otto

[John Kufrovich]

Dave,
You will need to upgrade your FW. Your current version 2.38 doesn't support the U320 EMU inside the MSA30 shelves.

jk

[Dave Thompson_5]

Upgraded MSA1000 firmware to v4.48.