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Re: MSA 1500, cannot connect servers to drives

 
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Lenny_17
New Member

MSA 1500, cannot connect servers to drives

I have one server allowed access to all drives.
Another WIndows 2003 server has access to one drive. The drive shows up in disk manager as a foreign disk. However it is fully acessable on the other server. I want one server that can access all 5 drives for back up purposes.
Then each other server gets it's own one drive. It refuses to do so. Is this possible to do. I am using securepath also.
ANy help would be great.
6 REPLIES 6
Lenny_17
New Member

Re: MSA 1500, cannot connect servers to drives

ALso just to add, here is the event log error message I get.

INTERNAL Error - There are no valid log copies in the disk group (C1000082).
Steven Clementi
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: MSA 1500, cannot connect servers to drives

Lenny:

Do you mean to say that one host is accessing all 5 LUNS and 1 host is accessing 1 of those 5 luns (x5)?


If so, it is unsupported and will not work properly without the proper 3rd party software.

You file system will get corrupted each time one server tries to access the disk when the other server is already accessing it.

Your multipath software is NOT usable for sharing LUNS, only for managing multiple paths.


Steven
Steven Clementi
HP Master ASE, Storage, Servers, and Clustering
MCSE (NT 4.0, W2K, W2K3)
VCP (ESX2, Vi3, vSphere4, vSphere5, vSphere 6.x)
RHCE
NPP3 (Nutanix Platform Professional)
Lenny_17
New Member

Re: MSA 1500, cannot connect servers to drives

Hello Steven, thank you so much for your reply. Only Monday I was sent to this place to sort out the whole mess. Now I know why our exchange was having problems.
Interesting that Windows2003 server will not connect to a volume that another server has connected to. But windows 2000 will. and then some hours later our Exchange server looses it's volumes and goes down.
The reason they bought this setup was to have each of 5 servers access it's own array volume. Then one server would access them all directly for backup purposes. I guess we will need a new plan.
You mentioned special software that could allow us to do this. Do you have any recomendations? Would it slow things down?
+
Once again thank you for your expert advice, you have really helped very much.

Lenny.
Steven Clementi
Honored Contributor

Re: MSA 1500, cannot connect servers to drives

What are the other 4 servers doing? File/Print? SQL?


The only way you can get 2 servers to utilize the same logical unit at the same time is to have 3rd party File Locking/Acess Controlling software.

Usually this software is used so that 2 or more servers can access the same shared drive and "load balance" access to it from users, like a File Server. I am not sure if your original intent is feasible in this manner.

Software that can do this includes:

1. PolyServe
2. Veritas Cluster Server
3. RedHat Linux Cluster Suite ;o)

and I am sure there might be a few more.

You might spend better time figuring out if your backup software has a SAN option and do Direct to Tape backups.

What backup Software do you have?

VCS is probably the likely software that can handle what you want to do, but I don't have much, nor really any, experience with it to say "yea, sure it can do that".


Steven
Steven Clementi
HP Master ASE, Storage, Servers, and Clustering
MCSE (NT 4.0, W2K, W2K3)
VCP (ESX2, Vi3, vSphere4, vSphere5, vSphere 6.x)
RHCE
NPP3 (Nutanix Platform Professional)
Lenny_17
New Member

Re: MSA 1500, cannot connect servers to drives

Hi Steven, we are using Ultrabac 7.1. I will look into that. The servers are file and print and exchange attached to it.
We will have two racks the same for redundancy. The plan is to use double-take 4.4 as a failover. However I would be more in favour of Clustering. I don't get the last word unfortunatly.

We have one SANS per rack.

Len
Timothy Cusson
Valued Contributor

Re: MSA 1500, cannot connect servers to drives

First off, I agree with everything Steve said.

The MSA1500 can support up to 7 servers with single port fibre channel host bus adapters, example HP FC2214 (they have Q-Logic chips on board) single port PCI fibre channel adapters when you have one 8 port fibre switch, example HP SanSwitch 2/8V. You don't need the optional HP SecurePath software if you only have one path from the server to the MSA1500.

On the other hand, if you have two HP FC2214 fibre HBA's in the server, then you MUST have either HP SecurePath or Microsoft MPIO driver to control the data path access from the server to the MSA1500. (You will see ghost drives without the software but they might work.)

As Steve said you need addtional software to control access to multiple logical disks on the MSA1500 from multiple servers, for example, you could setup a Microsoft cluster of five servers then they would all "see" and have access to all five logical drives on the MSA. The cluster software only allows one server to access a drive at one time.

There is another way to do it without special software...

If you have five HP ProLiant DL380 servers with one HP FC2214 fibre HBA in each one and one 8 port fibre switch connecting the servers to the MSA1500. Power on the MSA1500 and one DL380, power off the other four servers or disconnect their fibre cables. Run the ACU (HP Array Configuration Utility, create the five logical disks on the MSA1500, also known as LUN's. Now, from the ACU, enable "Selective Storage Presentation", now present the first logical disk to server 1, this is done by linking the WWID (World Wide IDentification number) of the FC2214 HBA to the logical drive. Now run "Disk Administrator" on server 1, you may have to tell "Disk Administrator" to scan for new disks, sometimes you have to reboot to make the disk appear in "Disk Administrator". Once you see the disk, you have to prepare it, it needs a Windows signature, a partion, and then formatting. NOTE: Select "Quick Format" to save time. I recommend you assign the disk a drive letter J ot higher, this way the drive letters will "stick" and won't change after reboots. To test the new drive, go to "My Computer" and copy some files from drive C: to the new drive J:, OK everything is working!

Now connect server 2 fibre cables and turn it on, after it boots up, go back to server 1 and run ACU, go to selective presentation and assign logical drive 2 to server 2. NOTE: server 2 will have a different WWID. Go back to server 2, and prepare the new disk as we did above.

Repeat this procedure one server at a time until all five servers have one new logical drive running off the MSA1500. Now you can shutdown or reboot any of the five servers and they will only have access to the one logical drive you assigned it. Each individual server has no access and no knowledge of the other server MSA1500 logical disk. The servers see the new drive just like a SCSI disk, they don't know it's on a MSA1500 SAN.

Now for the backup issue.

One simple answer would be to install Veritas backup on one server, then install Veritas backup agent on the other four. This works very well, it's simple to mangage and is very cost effective. The data is backed up across the network, for higher network performance, use the second NIC on each ProLiant to create a new "Backup Subnet", then configure Veritas to use the backup subnet IP address instead of the production subnet.

For higher performance and higher cost, buy a SAN fibre attached tape library, example MSL6030 with optional E1200 fibre adapter. Connect the MSL6030 tape library to the 8 port SAN switch. Buy four Veritas "Media Server" licenses and maybe a SAN license, check with Veritas for details. Install four Veritas Media server software and licenses on four of the servers. Now, the "master" Veritas backup server will tell each Veritas media server when it can use the fibre tape library, each server will backup directly from its MSA1500 logical drive to the tape library, NOT across the network!

Well, this was a rather long answer, I hope it helps.

Best Regards,

Tim

"There's more then one way to skin a cat."