MSA2324FC - 1 vdisk with 1 volume shows at 2 drives in Windows 2003 R2 ENT

[ecomboy]

Hi, For hardware I have an HP2324FC msa with an MSA70 shelf. The disk are all identicle 300GB sas. No san switches are used, it's all attached DAS style to 2 HP DL385's each with two fiber HBA's.
Using the SMA on the MSA2324FC I create 1 raid 10 Vdisk with 8 subdisks for a total of 16 drives. Then I create my first volume and carve out 4 of those 16 disks. So 1 vdisk with 1 volume approx 1200GB.

I expect to go into the windows server, disk management, rescan disks and find 1 volume.
Proble: I get two volumes showing up. Both are the same size 1200gb.

I'd like to give this one volume a single drive letter and name. why do I see two volumes in disk manager?
Thank you.
Dave

[kunalsahoo]

Hi ,

Are you using any multipathing software ?

if not you will se 2 luns for a single lun because you have 2 HBA cards insatlled and connected to MSA from servers.

if you have already installed multipathing and still you get this issue, then its quite obvious it is not working correctly.

[Amol Garge · Accepted solution]

Dave,

Since you are using 2 FC HBA's, you see two LUN's instead of one, as the OS can see the same LUN twice.

Solution: Install MPIO DSM for MSA2300. You will see one one LUN and be able to format and assign drive letter to it.

Advantage:One of many is: even if one controller or FC HBA fails, you will not lose LUN access.

Link:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=3971478&swItem=MTX-02c6d4c8154c43518f5cc74514&prodNameId=3882365&swEnvOID=1005&swLang=13&taskId=135&mode=4&idx=0

[ecomboy]

Amol Garge resolved this for me. Thanks!!