MSA1500 ACU and ADU problems

[Scott S.]

I have an MSA1500cs with two MSA30s connected.

We had added the second MSA30 two weeks ago and upgraded the firmware and presented the drives to 3 servers in a cluster, but we had not added them into Windows yet.

A week later a single drive on the first MSA30 failed. At that time I could get into the ADU to see all the drives and get a diagnostic report.

A week later and we are adding the new MSA30 drives into one server on the cluster after unpresenting them to the two others. All of this went fine, but when I went to remove the presentation for the new drives on the server, the ACU hangs on "Saving Configuration". If I force quit the hung application I cannot get back into the ACU until I reboot the server.

After the reboot I can get into the ACU, but the ADU just hangs no matter what.

I have even booted from the MSA1500 Support Software CD and run ADU from there, which also hangs.

Is this a problem with the MSA1500 or the new MSA30?

Is there any way I can run diagnostics from the console connection?

[John Kufrovich]

Scott,

You're not doing anything wrong.

I haven't been able to come up with a good recipe in duplicating the problem.

Sometimes if you shut everything down, servers first, then the MSA. Power up MSA, then one server. You should be able to get a report.



jk

[Andy_Stor]

Hi Scott,

Could you tell us what is the version of ACU and ADU installed on the servers? and when u face this issue during that time is it the none of the server can generate the ADU report or launch ACU. Did you try reinstalling the ACU and ADU on the server. You can generate report from the MSA CLI as well but it will only show you information about the disks and configuration info of the MSA1500cs and the MSA30s.

Cheers
Andy.

[Scott S.]

Thanks for the responses.

To answer the questions, the version of the ACU/ADU utility is 7.70.12.0. The version that runs when you boot form the CD is also 7.70.12.0.

When this issue occurs, no servers can launch the ACU or ADU utility successfully. In some instances it brings up IE (horrible mgmt interface if you ask me) and just is a blank white screen. Other times it won't even launch. This effectively kills it for the other systems since only one connection can be made.


HP Storage Support was of absolutely no help and had admitted they knew little about the MSA1500. They basically didn't want to troubleshoot since the ADU would lock up and wanted me to shut down our entire cluster just to run diagnostics. They didn't even know there was a CLI version of the ACU and was confused about clustering terms related to the MSA versus our Exchange cluster. All they could recommend other than reboot everything was upgrade the ACU and ADU to 7.80.6.0.

I've also noticed that when the ACU locks up, I can't access Windows Disk Manager or diskpart to view disks. Probably a side effect of these utilities locking up. A reboot of the passive Exchange node lets me view everything again, except the ADU.

It looks like I may have to shut down our cluster just to run diagnostics, which means a 3 AM phone call to HP afterwards where they know even less about MSAs. I've spent two weeks with this and I either need to verify it is a bad MSA or controller or that the cluster is somewhow interfering with the utilities.

Any troubleshooting steps would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again. - Scott

[John Kufrovich]

Scott,

What model of HBA?

You mentioned that ACU locks up. Does the ACU cli lockup. Just trying to determine if it's something in the GUI.

jk

[Scott S.]

QLogic with Multipath support. Driver version 9.1.3.16.

I understand from the System Admin that it is in a blade enclosure and it is a QL2300 series.

The ACU CLI does not lock up.

We are still on IE 6 on these machines. No updates have been applied for at least a month.