We're using DL380p Gen8 servers to run Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x64, using the built-in 420i SA controller for storage volumes. We are using WinPE 4.x w/ SA drivers, and Acronis True Image, to capture and restore the OS images on these systems.
We had an incident yesterday, where after the image was restored to the server successfully, the system would not boot into Linux; instead, the system would reboot without displaying the GRUB screen. Booting from an Ubuntu Live CD and performing a GRUB repair failed. We had applied the same SPP firmware version as previous systems (2013.02), but also tried using the latest 2013.09, and the results did not change. Installing Ubuntu "fresh" did boot normally, but we didn't want to re-configure our applications from scratch.
After extended troubleshooting and comparison, we downgraded the Intelligent Provisioning to version 1.40, which has an older version of the ACU than the SSA in version 1.50. After creating the array/logical drives with the older ACU, all was fine, and Ubuntu booted successfully from the restored image.
It therefore appears that arrays/logical drives created with the SSA in IP 1.50 are somehow incompatible with the way Acronis lays down the image, but I will need to test this on other systems to validate.
Has anyone run into this, and/or know why ACU vs SSA arrays would be different?
Not sure about ACU vs SSA, but there was a string if weird issues where none of the Logical Volumes was being marked as the Boot volume a few months ago.
If you get around to testing this again, verify the first Logical is flagged as the Primary/Boot volume.
