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Re: MSA2012, crash and upgrades

 
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Joshua Small_2
Valued Contributor

MSA2012, crash and upgrades

Hi all,

I have an MSA2012fc. I noted last night that the web interface appears to have become inaccessible on both controllers.
I can still SSH to the management console. It was suggested to me that I just restart the controllers. So my first question is, can anyone confirm that's definitely safe to do on a running system, and which commands should be used?

Secondly, I have been made aware a significant firmware upgrade has just been released. I've been burned by HP's firmware upgrades a number of times in the past, so I'm looking for success (or fail) stories regarding the MSA2012fc-J200P30-03 upgrade. I'm aware the documentation suggests it's safe to do online, but again, can anyone clarify this has worked for them?

The changenotes includes:
Fixed a case where the management controller could appear unresponsive

I'm expecting this suggests my current situation is the "unresponsive" issue being referred to above, and stop happening after firmware upgrade. Can anyone confirm/deny this?

 

 

P.S. This thread has been moved from Storage Area Networks (SAN) (Enterprise) to Storage Area Networks (SAN) (Small and Medium Business). - Hp Forum moderator

9 REPLIES 9
Wickedsunny
Valued Contributor

Re: MSA2012, crash and upgrades

Could you please answer a few questions:-

a) What is the current Firmware level?

b) When you say Unresponsive, is it only the SMU (Web management console) which becomes inaccessible or the Data Luns as well?
Joshua Small_2
Valued Contributor

Re: MSA2012, crash and upgrades

The firmware is currently Code Version J200P24 for the RAID controller, Code Version W420R45 on the management controller.

I'm sure this was part of an easier named bundle.

The "unresponsive" refers only to the web interface. LUNs are fine. Telnet is fine.
Wickedsunny
Valued Contributor

Re: MSA2012, crash and upgrades

Thank you for the answers:-


The Web interface could hang or become unresponsive due to the following reasons on the current firmware level:-

a) The SMU may hang after drive failures.

If this condition occurs, access the array using the command line interface (CLI) and restart the management controller (MC) using the command: restart mc a (single controller) or restart mc both (dual controller).

If you restart a Management Controller, communication with it is temporarily lost
until it successfully restarts. If the restart fails, the partner Management Controller remains active with full ownership of operations and configuration information.

b) Due to wrong proxy settings on the browser. Though this is the first point of failure to be checked but I have seen a lot of cases where users forget to check the browser settings.

c) Lastly and most importantly it could be due to the network connections either cables or Ethernet ports.



To restart the controllers you need to use the following command from CLI:-

restart

Restarts the RAID controller or the Management Controller in either or both controller modules.

If you restart a RAID controller, it attempts to shut down with a proper failover sequence, which includes stopping all I/O operations and flushing the write cache to disk, and then the controller restarts. The Management Controllers are not restarted so they can provide status information to external interfaces.

Caution ├в If you restart both controller modules, you and users lose access to the system and its data until the restart is complete.

Note ├в If the storage system is connected to a Microsoft Windows host, the following event is recorded in the Windows event log:

Initiator failed to connect to the target.


Now coming down to the first thing which I would suggest you to do is to:-

a) Restart the Management Controller as the issue is not with the Array controllers but only the web access portal.

c) If this does not work then restart the controllers. Keep the above mentioned points in mind.

b) Upgrade the firmware as suggested because to avoid this situation in future you would require the J200P30-03. I have helped a lot of customer, installing this and have not faced any issues if done as per release notes. The only condition is that there should be no hardware failure on the setup else the firmware will roll back automatically to the previous version.

c) If you have any additional drive enclosures then update there firmwares as well.


Note: Please ref to CLI Reference guide for CLI commands and procedures.

http://bizsupport2.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01505833/c01505833.pdf
Joshua Small_2
Valued Contributor

Re: MSA2012, crash and upgrades

Thanks for this information.
Restarting the management controller has indeed corrected the issue.

We are planning to roll out this firmware upgrade shortly.
To confirm, the storage controllers should fail over and not require any downtime?

Wickedsunny
Valued Contributor

Re: MSA2012, crash and upgrades

Yes the controllers should failover as per the normal behavior.

While upgrading MSA2000 controller firmware is considered non-disruptive in dual controller environments. Upgrading disk enclosure firmware does disrupt host IO. It is recommended that when upgrading disk enclosure firmware all host IO is stopped.

Hence you should have a downtime for upgrading the Disk Enclosure firmwares.

Regards,
Sunny
Joshua Small_2
Valued Contributor

Re: MSA2012, crash and upgrades

So to confirm, this update is the currently listed "firmware update" for the MSA2000 series:
MSA2012fc-J200P30-03.zip

So this one is a controller update (we don't have any external enclosures) and is fine for an online upgrade?

I realise I'm double stressing here - but we've got a lot of connected VMs, and I'd hate to get it wrong.
Wickedsunny
Valued Contributor
Solution

Re: MSA2012, crash and upgrades

Please go ahead with the upgrade. If you have dual controllers the failover will happen. If you want to check this. You can attempt a manual failover as a test.


Regards,
Sunny
Wickedsunny
Valued Contributor

Re: MSA2012, crash and upgrades

Hi Joshua,

I hope you were able to update the firmware. Please lemme know if there are any issues.


Cheers,
Sunny
Joshua Small_2
Valued Contributor

Re: MSA2012, crash and upgrades

Yes we have completed this upgrade. It took a while to get the downtime scheduled.

We decided to do it "offline" for safety, but appears to have run perfectly without any timeouts on our ESXi servers (still running, just VMs shutdown).

It took a long (50 minutes) time to apply though.