P2000 G3 iSCSI MSA Unable to create Vdisk

[Vint]

Hello All,

My P2000 currently has one Vdisk and I am trying to add another Vdisk to perform a volume copy operation. The existing Vdisk consists of nine 600 GB SAS drives, including the spare, in a RAID 5 configuration, SMU reports it is 4.2 TB,

The new Vdisk will be composed of 1.8 TB drives, also in a RAID 5 configuration (to avoid volume copy incompatibilities if that is a thing). When I click "Create Vdisk" I get "Unable to create Vdisk Vd2. An invalid device was specified. I selected enough drives (I inserted 7) to ensure the new disk is larger than the existing disk and identified a spare. SMU shows all the new drives are AVAIL.

Where did I go wrong?

Thanks,

Vint

[Fiberfish]

Hi Vint,

Keeping the final motive of doing a volume copy aside.

What we are trying is to creat a new Vdisk, my assumption is that you have two controller in MSA.

Try following and confirm the status :--

a) Try creating Vdisk using other controller IP, that is if we have used controller A IP earlier and have attempted with the error, then try opening SMU using controller B IP.

b) Restart the management controller (MC) of both controller ( restart mc both ) and then try creating the Vdisk using any other Vdisk name ( apart from Vd2 ).

Confirm the status following that....

Regards

I am an HPE Employee....

[Vint]

        Thanks for your response. The reason for creating the vdisk is to make a volume copy. vd01 contains two volumes. Volume vd01_001 is 999.9 MB originally used as a witnes disk for my 2008 hyper-v failover cluster. Volume vd01_002 is a 4195.5 GB vol used by by the cluster as a cluster shared volume. 

        After the failure I re-read the free manual and I think I had it wrong anyway. The Help file says the destination volume must be in a vdisk owned by the same controller as the source volume.

        I changed course and afer inserting additional 1.8TB hdds, performed a volume expansion. I next tried to perform the volume copy operation. It failed because "There is insufficient free space available in the virtual disk". A snap pool was created the first time I attempted the volume copy. I expanded the snap pool to the max available and tried again. The retry failed due to insufficient disk space. I inserted more disks, performed another expansion, and expanded to snap pool again successfuly. I now have the maximum number of disks in the raid 5 raid set. The snap pool Overview page shows the snap pool is 4.3 TB with 4196.5 GB free with 1 client volume, vd01_002, and 0 resident snapshots.

I do have redundant controllers and I attempted the volume copy from the other controller and got the same insufficient space message. Next I restarted both management controllers and tried the vol copy again from both interfaces and still get insufficient disk space..

I have not attempted to create another vdisk as I am at the very limits of capacity and frankly I am being conservative/too scared to be aggressive as I do not want to risk damage to the existing vd01_002 which contains two dozen virtual machines I desparately want to recover. 

Looks like someone is working Thanksgiving weekend.

Vint

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1]

As per my understanding with current configuration you will not be able to create Volume copy and the error that you are getting is as expected. Let me explain,

vd01 Vdisk Size -> 4.2TB

vd01_002 Volume Size-> 4195.5 GB

Now in order to create Volume copy of volume named vd01_002 you need 20% of Volume space as Snap pool which is nothing but 839.1 GB which needs to be available inside vdisk named vd01. This space is not available inside vd01 and that is why you are again and again getting error of Insufficient Space.

Please find the same information available from the below link (eventhough this was for MSA2040 but same logic applies here as well),

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c05075467#N10ACE

"The first time a volume copy is created of a standard volume, the volume is converted to a master volume and a snap pool is created in the volume’s vdisk. The snap pool’s size is either 20% of the volume size or 5.37GB, whichever is larger. The recommended minimum size for a snap pool is 50GB. Before creating or scheduling copies, verify that the vdisk has enough free space to contain the snap pool."

I would suggest you to go through section "Creating a volume copy"

Now if you still need to create volume copy then I would suggest to take data backup and delete the volumes and vdisk. Then add more drives and create a big vdisk which can accomodate volumes and snap pool. Then go for volume copy creation. My personal suggestion don't go for vdisk expansion as this can be very risky and time consuming. Risk in the sense once you started vdisk expansion then you can't stop it for any reason, only option would left is delete the vdisk. You can refer SMU guide or best practice whitepaper to get more details on Vdisk expansion.

Please let me know if you still have doubts.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

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[Fiberfish]

Hi Vint,

Yes, Seems spact is concern here ....

Thumb rule is that apart from the volume capacity , you need atlest 20% of the volume size available in the Vdisk for the snap-pool to be created, the more the merrier ...  in both Source and Destination Vdisk.

Snap-pool contains the differential data, thus there could be need for it to expand... Therefore we need to ensure that space for snap-pool is available in both the Vdisk.

If you still have difficulty , you can raise a support call with HPE with MSA store.logs .

Regards

I am an HPE employee.....