Panic'ing RX6600 Backup Server after additional LTO-4 Drives

[Alzhy]

We recently added 4 more LTO-4 Drives (SAN connected) to an otherwise stable 11.31 RX6600. The server has 8 4Gbit FC Drives of which 4 are disk HBAs and 4 aer Tape HBAs previously serving 10 LTO-4 drives. After the 4 LTO Drivs were added -- that's when things started panic'ing.

These 14 LTO-4 Drives are part of an SSO (Shared storage Scheme) so the RX6600 will never really at any time USE all 14 drives (4 4Gbit HBAs will never really drive even just 8 of these LTO-4s anyways).

HP has so far adviced estape patch. No Avail. And over the weekend - SAS and COmmonIO drivers were requested to be at the latest and greatest.. Again no Avail.

The panic message following the latest SAS and CommonIO drivers is:

modelname ia64 hp server rx6600
panic post_hndlr(): Unresolved kernel interruption

Prior to the patch and updates, the panic string was:

modelname ia64 hp server rx6600
panic Fault when executing in kernel mode

with the stack trace matching the need for the latest estape patch.

Anyone having a similar issue? Is there a known limit to the number of FC-HBAs pr LTO-4 Luns on 11.31/rx6600?

[TTr]

How are the zones created for all the tape HBAs and the tape drives? If you put multiple HBAs and tape drives in the same zone, you can interference among the HBAs. Ideally you want all separate zones with one HBA and one tape drive in the zone. In some cases I have used one HBA with 2-3 tape drives in the same zone without any issues. Does the server panic right away or when you start using the tape drives? Do you get to see the ioscan of all the tape drives?

[Alzhy]

TTr,

Our zones are 1 HBA and 3 to 4 LTO-4 Drives (on this server at least).

On our other servers that are SAN Media Clients and that only have 2 HBAs -- we have 1 HBA and 7 LTO-4 Drives. The SAN Media CLients never ever use more than 2 LTO-4 Drives. The Master/Media Server (the rx6600) may use more than 4 drives but not the entire 14.

We were on this configuration for close to a year with out issues. When we added the 4 LTO Drives -- we had 1 mega weeend backup window and about 3 days if incremenetal days when this issue appeared.

Thanks.