FC60 controllers

[Oleg Mochkin]

There is mission-critical system with FC60 with two controllers connected to host (HP-UX) with two HBA for redundancy. There is another system (HP-UX) with FC60 also. Suppose, one of FC60 controller at first system is failed. Is it possible to replace it with controller witch has ben taken from second system that can be shuting down at any time ? Is there can be contradiction between configuration that are stored in controller NVRAM ?
Oleg.

[Insu Kim · Accepted solution]

It would be possible but I think that it's not desirable in some ways.

From controller firmware standpoint,
When a new controller module is isntalled, the exsiting controller checks the firmware version of the new controller such as NVSRAM settings and revision numbers.
If the versions do not match, the existing controller downloads its firmware to the nwe controller module.
This procesure, called Auto-Code Synchronization (ACS) ensures that both controllers are operating with the same version of firmware.

During ACS, the bootware and appware versions will be checked and synchrinized if needed.
After all, replacing faulty controller with the controller of another FC60 should be no problem but in the manual, it also indicates that a fuctioning controller should be treated with extra caution.

In the FC60 document,
it says that it you're replacing a functioning controller because you suspect it may be causing problems, the state of the controller should be set to Failed before removing it by using amutil commmand.

This is my 2 cents.
Controller modules are fully hot swappable and not cause any disruption when either of dual controllers is in a bad state but eventually lead to performance degradation though.
If I were in this case, I probably placed a support call to HP and wait for a while instead of taking an inadequate action.

Please remember this.
FC60 is much more sensitive than any other disk arrays supplied by HP and not that easy as far as maintenance concerned.

Hope this helps,