DL380G2 - Storage Does Not Come Online!

[G McCord]

Hi,

We have two of these packaged cluster machines attached to a R6000 UPS. If the machines have been running on UPS power then automatically shutdown, they fail to come online correctly when power is restored. The servers themselves come online quickly but the boot process stops because the servers report that the storage cannot be found. Restarting the servers sorts out the problem because the storage is then powered up and available.

Does anyone know a way to make the servers wait for the storage to initialise - obviously this happens in the middle of the night and 20 miles away so manual intervention is not possible!

Thanks for any replies.

[John Bolene]

When NT or W2K starts, there is a pause that can be selected, which may or may not help.

In W2K, go to my computer properties, startup, display list of OS for whatever seconds.

Otherwise, you can put a DOS wait in autoexec.bat

Hopefully you have setup to boot from the internal drives and not an external array.

[G McCord]

Thanks, the machines do boot from their own system disks (C drives), the shared storage (W,X,Y drives) just hold additional data files produced by our application.

I'll try adding in a 1 minute delay into the boot process and see if it sorts it.

[G McCord]

This solution will not work. The problem occurs during the POST process so before the OS gets involved.

The i5 Storage Array takes longer to boot than the GL380 servers, I have disabled the fast boot option in the bios setup program for the server(making it count each mb of 1gb of ram) but I am still 20 seconds out.

I can see any more options that could delay the server boot process.

[G McCord]

ps this post is should be titled "i5 RAID Array does not boot quickly enough"