MSA1500CS FC-AL losing 2 redundant paths after ignite restore

[CA567850]

We have an Active/Active MSA1500CS (tech support dump attached) that was originally configured with 4 paths for each LUN locally attached to a RP7440 using 2x A6826A FC cards - single connections. We had a boot failure on the 11th and restored the OS from an Ignite tape. Afterwards we only see 2 physical paths per LUN from the MSA including the boot disk (unit 0).

I have been beating my head on this for 2 weeks digging through all the information I can find. HP support doesn't seem to be able to help on this either. They suggested I enable independant cache but I don't have a way of doing so. We don't have any Windoze servers with HBA, only my HP-UX 11.23. I also can't seem to find an ACU-CLI for 11.23 PA either.

PVLINKS seems to be OK since it can pick up 2 paths and I have set the vgextend successfully for that path. We run a process on the DB this server hosts and I need the paths hard coded for the 4 luns to maximize the I/O.

Any help would be great!

PS I know a cache battery is bad. I have one for the next maintenance window.

[Johan Guldmyr]

"2x A6826A FC cards - single connections."

Does that mean that from each of these dual-port cards you only have one connection to the MSA1500? So that these offline ports are normal:

Controller 2 Port 1 Status = Offline
Controller 1 Port 1 Status = Offline

[CA567850]

That is correct. We only have one connection from each dual port HBA into the MSA. So those offline / online port statii are for the dual port cards on the 7440?

[CA567850]

Here is a ioscan -fn detail of how the disk paths used to look.

Edit: that was taken from another 7440 but  the only difference is /dev/fcd0 is at 0/0/14 and not 1/0/6

[Johan Guldmyr]

>> So those offline / online port statii are for the dual port cards on the 7440?

I would say that those are the statuses for the unused fc host ports fc in the MSA1500, but I suppose it's the same thing.

Why would it have four paths? I only see two paths to the MSA.

Maybe that's an HP-UX/PVLINKS thing that I don't understand..

[CA567850]

Not sure but it definately had 4 paths somehow before. I can't seem to duplicate the settings on this server and the other 7440 never had 4 paths / lun. We did add a second shelf to the first a few weeks after testing it. The shelves have dual port cards that each go into the head unit.

[John Kufrovich]

If you are direct attach from HBA to MSA1500, the maximum paths is two.  1 per HBA port.  Impossible to have 4 paths.