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Re: Second controller

 
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Deborah Weatherspoon
Frequent Advisor

Second controller

Hi all,

We have two L3000 which should failover if there is a problem. However, yesterday we had a bad GBIC on one controller but both systems were down ??? They only replaced one GBIC and then everything was fine after changing the world wide name??? We have two controllers

Can anyone help me understand why didn't the systems failover? Is there anything I can do to prevent this next time ?

Thanks
17 REPLIES 17
TTr
Honored Contributor

Re: Second controller

I assume by failover you are using serviceguard and that the GBIC was on a storage controller and not LAN.

A bad GBIC does not warrant a service failover. In a critical environment as with your cluster, you would have set up dual path and load balancing for all your storage.

A single GBIC would NOT bring any of the servers down. Even the server with the bad GBIC should stay up and there should be NO failover. Something else is/went wrong or your server/storage setup is not right.
Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Second controller

You should give more information about your hardware. Where is this GBIC? On the switch or on the storage array? What kind of array?
I guess you will find more information in your syslog and cluster log files.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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Deborah Weatherspoon
Frequent Advisor

Re: Second controller

We have a va7100. There is a fiber cable that is in the brocade switch and the controller on both systems. I must add that we have serviceguard and while vg00 mounted I had to manually activate the volume groups for serviceguard. This is something we never had to do.
Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Second controller

I assume the bad GBIC was on the VA controller. Does the array have dual controllers?

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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Deborah Weatherspoon
Frequent Advisor

Re: Second controller

Yes
TTr
Honored Contributor

Re: Second controller

> We have a va7100. There is a fiber cable
> that is in the brocade switch and
> the controller on both systems.

Is there one cable that from the switch to each of the L3000?

What about from the array to the switch? one or two cables?

What about the zones in the switch, how are they setup?

The VA7100 is active/passive with only one redundancy group (failover only not load balancing)

> I must add that we have serviceguard
> and while vg00 mounted I had to manually
> activate the volume groups for
> serviceguard. This is something we
> never had to do.

Are you booting each server from the SAN?
Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Second controller

Please don't call the VA active/passive!

From the manual:

"There are two internal fibre channel loops, one from each controller. The Fibre
channel disks are dual ported; each fibre channel port is connected to a
different controller. The controllers are connected via an internal highperformance
bus, which allows the LUNs to be accessed through both
controllers, and for loop or disk failover communication."


(Users manual - page 40)


Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Second controller

I'm still not sure about your configuration.
Can you post the results of:

# armdsp -a
# armtopology

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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TTr
Honored Contributor

Re: Second controller

I agrre with Torsten, I don't consider the VA7100 active/passive either :) but HP does. When I confronted them at one point they claimed one controller is active the other is passive!!!

I guess vendors manipulate the terminology to their advanage.

From that point on I started to clarify with each vendor what they mean by active/passive by verifying that "the array is active/passive on both controllers" or "each controller is active with the other one being passive".