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Re: MSA2012fc vdisk problem

 
Carl-Martell Sippel
Occasional Advisor

Re: MSA2012fc vdisk problem

Hi,
trying to answer the latest questions:

1. scrub is an automatic, but configurable process. You can turn it on or off (WebUI: Manage -> General Config -> System Configuration). It doesn't run at a specific time interval, but continously. You can however specify the utility priority on the same config page.

2. According to HP support, this is caused by (at least) one disk showing a high error rate, but being still operational. Due to a FW bug or limitation the system can not identify which disk exactly is causing this.
It was supposed to be fixed with the FW upgrade realeased end of October 2008, but wasn't. Now it's supposed to be in the next FW upgrade - whenever this may be realesed :-(

3. Again according to HP support the system will still be able to identify when a disk encounters a "hard error". So this shouldn't directly cause any data loss (assuming you have properly configured RAID sets and such). So personally I keep the system runnning as is and hope for the next upgrade to fix it... However I still feel uncomfortable knowing the might be a (in some way) erroneous disk. In particular in case another disk fails and data consistency then depends on all other disks keeping up until the RAID is reconstructed. So I'd say you have to decide yourself how critical you consider this bug and the data on your MSA (we happen to have the data mirrored to another MSA anyway - so I am still kind of relaxed :-). This thread shows some advices what you could do to isolate the faulty disk. But regardless of this specific issue you should of course have a regular valid backup of the data on your MSA...

Best Regards,

Carl Martell
W. Voos
New Member

Re: MSA2012fc vdisk problem

We have found out that enabling the INFORMATIONAL Event #58 (Recoverable disk drive errors) shows the failing drive ...
Stephen Denton
New Member

Re: MSA2012fc vdisk problem

Hi All,

I'm currently in the same situation...

MSA2012fc Critical: SCRUB_ARRAY_COMPLETE
Scrub failed on vdisk
51 parity mismatches detected
It├в s imperative you contact technical support...
EVENT CODE:207
EVENT SEVERITY:Error

Current firmware: J200P30

HP have recommended the following...

1. Take backup of the data from the vdisk.
2. Delete the exisiting Vdisk.
3. Update the controller firmware to J200P39.
4. Recreate the vidsk in a "OFFLINE" mode.
5. Restore data backup.

As a best practice, we have to create a vdisk in the offline mode.
You can still update the firmware to J200P39 to resolve the issue about the controller reboot, however the vdisk scrub errors would still persist if the vdisk has not been deleted and recreated in offline mode.

WOW!

We are a School running a virtualised environment which is hosted on the SAN. There are 16 VM's (Mostly servers including Domain Controllers, Exchange, Intranet, File, Print, Application, TS, basically everything!), are on a single volume which uses all the space on the SAN. As you can appreciate the data is critical and the amount of time/downtime spent resolving this issue will be high. I do not have a spare SAN and do not have the budget for a spare SAN. Can anybody out there help with the risks involved in not resolving our problem, or indeed the best way to resolve this situation in a timely and realistic fashion?

Also if this is just a faulty hard drive, then resolving the situation as per HP's advice will surely leave ourselves in the same situation with just my loss of sanity! Will upgrading to firmware J200P39 provide any more useful information/tools for fixing my issue? Or will it just stop the errors increasing?

Hi W. Voos...

How do you enable this event and do I have to be on the latest version of Firmware to achieve this? When I do a full debug log dump I can see that I have 0 Event #58 errors!

Thanks in advance to all!
Chris Ciapala
Trusted Contributor

Re: MSA2012fc vdisk problem

I'd first upgrade firmware to latest version. First controller firmware, then HDD. Make sure to stop all IO before upgrading HDDs, especially on SATA disks.
I had similar problems in the past, but they are gone now without recreating vdisks.
Stephen Denton
New Member

Re: MSA2012fc vdisk problem

I cannot find a firmware upgrade for the SAS 300GB 15k Dual Port P/N: AJ736A aka ST3300655SS disks! Although I will still try the Controller firmware update to J200P39 and let you all know the outcome...

Re: MSA2012fc vdisk problem

I was told by HP engineer to first upgrade the HDD firmware on the SATA drives, then the controller and enclosure last.
Reason should be that there is a small risk of the controller losing connection to the drives if power fails.

If your disk's are vdisk members I'll recommend that you upgrade one at a time and after each upgrade check that the disk is online again and vdisk is ok.
Remember to eliminate all I/O access and background scrub process before you begin (I turned off the SAN switches just to be sure).
Also be aware that when upgrading one drive, all drives managed by the specific controller will be taken offline temporarily even if the are in another enclosure.
If you have dual controllers and a drive firmware upgrade fails, you could try the upgrade from the other controller.

SATA drive updates takes about 5 min/disk.
Controller upgrade will take about 15 min/controller.
Enclosure upgrade will take about 5 min/enclosure.

Hope this information can help someone as it did for me.