Port layout issue and management of HPMSA1510i

[tech_contact]

I have an MSA1510i with four attached ports and one main controller and a stand-by.

Sa0
Sa1
Sb0
Sb1

Recently we ran out of IPs (7 is max) on the sa1/sb1 controllers and added new IPs on the Sa0/Sb0.
We could not get any nodes to connect, as Sa0 seems to be the management port, so we had to move cable to the same VLAN that all of the nodes are on = .254.

Is this recommended because the management interface just dropped off...? How would I keep the management on a separate VLAN, but still maintain connections from the Nodes?

It seems strange that the management interface is one of the ports I listed above. This does not seem right.

[Allan D'Souza]

I'm not sure I understand your problem entirely. You can have 8 IP addresses per port. The Management port shares the same physical port as any of the data ports. You can make any physical port on the Active controller as your Management port. By default MA0 is your Management port. During a failover, it gets mirrored to the B controller and maintains symmetry by failing over to MB0 alongwith it's IP address. The Management port is logically isolated from the data ports since it is a seperate PCI functional device. You can assign a IP address, VLAN and Gateway to the management interface just as you would any interface. It has nothing to do with the data ports IP addresses. Note - The data ports are assigned static IP addresses but the management port can use DHCP. The only common part is the physical cabling to the first switch on your network. Hope this helps.

[tech_contact]

Thanks, but this Virtual Port (MB0, MB1) is the worse design I've ever seen because when it fails over to the stand-by controller, the stand-by controller cable might not even be plugged into the same switch as the IP on MB0.

How do you get around this? Here's what I mean.

I've assigned MB0 an IP of 172.16.1.20...

When it fails over, it goes to MB1, which is not even plugged into the .1 network.

[Allan D'Souza]

Current management port design restricts the IP address to be common to both controllers. It is a problem if the two controllers are connnected to different networks that cannot reach the management port from either one. We are taking this short coming seriously and will be adding the option to configure a management port on either controller each with it's own address and gateway. There will be no management port failover in the new scheme in the next revision of the firmware.

[tech_contact]

Thanks, Alan, for your insight into this issue.