MSA60 Configuration Options

[R. L. Kern]

I have installed the E500 in place of the areca and the MSA 60 is online and recognized with the ACU only. In other words if you don't create a logical volume in the ACU then then solaris doesn't see the individual drives. i.e. it is not a "pass-through" controller/JBOD arrangement. It can be configured with multiple RAID0 one drive logical volumes but there are potential problems with this in ZFS.
It seems the MSA60 will not allow software RAID/ZFS

[Johan Guldmyr]

According to gregersenj you need to use a SAS controller for that functionality, not a RAID controller like the E500.

[R. L. Kern]

FROM HP WEBSITE E500 overview

The HP Smart Array E500 is HP's first external connect only, entry level PCI Express (PCIe) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) RAID controller. The full size card has 8 ports (2 x4 mini SAS external connectors) and utilizes DDR2-533 memory. The SA-E500 offers RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 and can be upgraded with the battery-backed write cache (BBWC) module for RAID 5. This low-profile card is ideal for customers needing a low-cost external connect for HP ProLiant servers to tape, JBODs, and intelligent Modular Storage Arrays (MSA).

So did I misinterpret the last line? Is the implication the box dictates the functionality not the array controller card? I took the earlier posts to mean the opposite.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Well, with HP-UX and HP-UX/OpenVMS you also need dual domain io module and the SC44Ge.

For your question: both?

[R. L. Kern]

I tried multiple config options, the E500 would only let me see the individual drives if I made each drive a RAID0. I have tried an LSI 9200-8e connected to the msa60 and it presents each drive individually to the host (HBA) no RAID necessary.
I believe this is a functional limitation of the HP Smart Array E500.
Thanks again for all the advice.
RLK

[Johan Guldmyr]

Sounds great :-)
Are you going to keep using that or go with an hba that hp sells? Is a support thing.. If you run into issues it may be hard to get help from the support.

[R. L. Kern]

Yes at the moment we are using the LSI, mainly because I was unable to find an HP card which would perform that function. The one mentioned earlier in the thread sounded as though it may be a possibility but one paragraph made me think it would only do so on an Integrity server with dual port SAS drives (we are using large SATA drives). At the moment the biggest (SMALL) snag I have run into is that since they were formatted as RAID 0 by the E500, when I destroyed the raid0 array and put in the new LSI card solaris is now using the large hexadecimal target id rather than the sequential decimal numbering common to most ZFS pools.
i.e. instead of c0t1d0, c0t2d0...
I get something like c0t5000C5E0834FE006d0
and despite low-level formatting, array destruction with the hardware card, etc. I cannot shake this tagging. Is this a behavior of solaris 10 when accessing a SAS expander or just something the E500 smart array card wrote to the firmware of the SATA drive ??
Thanks

[Johan Guldmyr]

That is the way the LUN looks like from an AMS2500 in SunOS. That disk comes via fc.

Maybe that's the way it looks when they aren't pure disks.