Confused with MSA1500CS

[Dionisis Zapantis]

Hello

I want to ask some things for an MSA1500cs.
My installation includes 2 HP DL380 G4 servers, 1 MSA1500cs and 5 MSA20.
The servers has windows 2003 standard, veritas cluster server and SQL 2005. One day all the logical drives(5) from the second array became offline, i followed this procedure to recover the logical drives http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&taskId=110&prodSeriesId=415598&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=415598&objectID=c01204574

After this all logical drives became online and the following message appeared in ACU for logical drive 9 and 10.
"Background parity initialization is currently queued or in progress on Logical Drive 9 (2.0 TB, RAID 6 (ADG)). If background parity initialization is queued, it will start when I/O is performed on the drive. When background parity initialization completes, the performance of the logical drive will improve."

The rebuild progress remains in 0%. From Veritas Storage Foundation i can access only the 5 volumes from the first array, in the second array i can see the volumes but i cannot access them, they don't have drive letter.
I want to know if the problem is in the H/W or S/W and how can i solve this problem.

I'm sending the report from diagnostics tool.

Thank you.

[Uwe Zessin · Accepted solution]

> it will start when I/O is performed on the drive

Simply implementation details that confuses users again and again. It means that you have to write to the logical disk (e.g. by writing a signature or creating a partition) before the box begins the parity initialization.

[Dionisis Zapantis]

The partitions have already created and they have written data, but they doesn't have drive letters. If i assign a drive letter to each volume will the initialization process begin? Is there any danger for data loss?
Thank you for your response.

[Uwe Zessin]

Ah, OK. Then Veritas software must have become confused, too.
I think it is safe to assign a drive letter. When Veritas starts access to the file system it will certainly do write operation which will trigger the MSA parity rebuild.

[Dionisis Zapantis]

The problem solved, 1 week after the initialization process finished and the cluster works fine.

Thank you for your help.