failed SAS drive in an rx6600 11.23 system

[donna hofmeister]

Please take a look at the attached file before plunging in...

There are four physical drives in this situation. We think that two drives (bay/slot 5 and 6) are (hw) raided together and are presented to the system as c3t0d0.   Similarly, 7 and 8 are presented as c3t1d0.

At the software level c3t0d0 and c3t1d0 are mirrored to each other.  (Talk about belts and suspenders!)

We know that drive 8 is having problems (yellow light is on).

Questions are

. Do we do anything other than simply replace this drive and let the system handle the rebuild?  Will LVM remain happy?

. Is there a way to figure out what's really raided together?

[Torsten. · Accepted solution]

vg00 is NOT hardware mirrored!

drives in slots 7+8 are a hardware mirror, drives in slots 5 and 6 are not.

drive in slot 8 has failed, simply pull and replace, check the status.

Here you can see drives 7 and 8 are mirrored:

---------- LOGICAL DRIVE 5 ----------

Raid Level                                         : RAID 1              
Volume sas address                                 : 0x68564241594c314   
Device Special File                                : /dev/rdsk/c3t2d0    
Raid State                                         : DEGRADED            
Raid Status Flag                                   : ENABLED             
Raid Size                                          : 69878               
Rebuild Rate                                       : 0.00 %              
Rebuild Progress                                   : 100.00 %            

Participating Physical Drive(s) :

SAS Address         Enc   Bay   Size(MB)      Type            State           

0x5000c50005966ae9   1     7    70007         PRIMARY         ONLINE         
0x5000c5000596b269   1     8    70007         SECONDARY       FAILED 

[donna hofmeister]

thanks!

i so hate to ask about rtfm....but is there something that discusses this?

[Torsten.]

discuss what exactly?

[donna hofmeister]

How SAS drives are configured, why 7 and 8 are raided to 5 and 6....

[donna hofmeister]

hmmm....maybe i'm not looking at this correctly?

7 and 8 are mirrored and are presented as the IR volume (c3t2d0)?  and maybe 5 is c3t0d0 and 6 is c3t1d0?

(what a strange configuration....)

[Torsten.]

It's not that strange.

When you ordered the system there were several options for the boot disks.

1) connected to the internal SAS chip as "raw" disks

2) connected to the internal SAS chip as IR Volume (Integrated RAID)

3) connected to the optional Smart Array P400 as hardware RAID

So you likely have option 2), but likely the system was re-installed later.

Somebody at HP decided to install disk from slot 8 to 1 - nobody knows why.

However, IMHO the hardware RAID is the better choice, it's a real pain to replace such SAS disk in LVM mirror config.

Finally, swap your disk in slot 8 and your problem is solved.