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Re: MSA2000sa vdisk Volumes to Drives

 
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T-Rock
Occasional Advisor

MSA2000sa vdisk Volumes to Drives

I'm new to the MSA2000. When I ordered it I assumed it wouldn't be very different than an MSA1000, which I'm very familiar with. Wow, nothing is the same...  It's been a tight learning curve but I've succeeded to create 4 volumes; one for the Quorum, one for SQL databases, one for User drives and one for the rest of the company Data.

 

The problem I'm having is that I don't know how to make them into formattable drives so they are visible to the server and I can start moving data. I'm not sure if I need to assign LUNs to the hosts or leave them with the default and if I do, how do I know what LUN to assign to what volume for each host?  I saw the drives (all 12) in Disk Management before I made the volumes and now they're gone.

 

My server OS is 2008 R2 x64 ENT w/SP1 fully up to date. It's connected by two SAS cables, one to each controller for Active/Active failover. The network configuration is as documentation suggests it to be.  I configured the SMU using the wizards.

 

Thanks, Tony

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Johan Guldmyr
Honored Contributor

Re: MSA2000sa vdisk Volumes to Drives

I believe it's called 'mapping' (the equivalent of SSP in MSA1000).
You need to use this to present the volume/LUN to the server.
You can right-click on the volumes/vdisks to get more options (took me a while to figure that out).
T-Rock
Occasional Advisor

Re: MSA2000sa vdisk Volumes to Drives

Hi Johan,

 

Thank you for the reply.  I understand they need to be mapped. I guess I should have been more informative with my questions.  They can be mapped per the volume or per the host interface.  Mapping to the volumes seems to be the best way so all disks are available to all hosts with the default host mapping. Since I am not sure which LUNs to use for mapping I have tried using LUNs 1, 2, 3, etc. The drives do then appear into the Drive Managment console but twice each.  I assume they are in there twice because I have two host interfaces. Unfortunately, with only 2 drives listed I'm unable to create the drives as RAID 5.  For testing purposes, I created the disks as striped for best performance. However, when I try to format the disk it fails to format.  I seriously do not understand why this is such a pain in the backside.

T-Rock
Occasional Advisor

Re: MSA2000sa vdisk Volumes to Drives

Since Striped disk wasn't working at all, and I thought it would be great to see this beast work in some way, I created 1 volume using the entire disk space available (11.2TB) and then created the disk as Spanned.  This worked fine and formatted as would be expected.

 

Spanned is really not the way I wanted to go with this.  I wanted the fault tolerance of raid. I guess I'll continue to monkey around with it unless I hear from someone who might be able to shed some light on what I'm doing wrong here.

Johan Guldmyr
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: MSA2000sa vdisk Volumes to Drives

If you see the same disk twice (in disk management in Windows) that means your multipathing is not installed.

Install MPIO and you should only see one and you should be able to format it.

Re: MSA2000sa vdisk Volumes to Drives

In order to create vdisk and how to present it to the server. After the presentation of the LUN or volume how to access it from the server. All these explained in user guide. Please find the following,

 

http://www.mn.uio.no/geo/english/services/it/help/print-scann-digitis/manuals/MSA/hp_sw_2012fc_msa_ug.pdf

 

In order to understand how to activate MPIO in windows 2008 please refer the following link,

 

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=c01564879

 

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Johan Guldmyr
Honored Contributor

Re: MSA2000sa vdisk Volumes to Drives

Great second link there Subhajit. Thanks.
T-Rock
Occasional Advisor

Re: MSA2000sa vdisk Volumes to Drives

Johan,

 

Thanks again for your reply.  I've been away at an IT conference and unfortunately just now able to get back to you.  Thanks for suggesting MPIO.  I actually already had it installed on my server but it hasn't been identifying the MSA at all.  I'll take a look at the additional information provided by Subhajit (thanks Subhajit) and I'll post back later.

T-Rock
Occasional Advisor

Re: MSA2000sa vdisk Volumes to Drives

Johan, sorry to take so long to get back to you. I've been quite busy. I wanted to let you know that it was indeed the MPIO that needed to be installed, both from HP and on the server as a Feature. Thanks very much for your help!
Johan Guldmyr
Honored Contributor

Re: MSA2000sa vdisk Volumes to Drives

Great stuff :) Thanks for coming back and reporting how it went.