MSL6000 and HSG80/Windows 2000 problems.

[David Borojevic]

We have a MSL6000 with an e1200 NSR connected to a HSG80, last week we had a simultaneous IO error on both tape drives in the MSL6000. This IO error was generated whilst backing up our servers using Veritas Backup Exec 9.1 (SAN SSO and library expansion installed). This caused any Windows 2000 SAN connected server to lose it's disks and several of these servers blue screened or became very unresponsive.

After some investigation we are unable to find the root cause of this "crash", anyone seen anything like this before?

[Marino Meloni_1]

I would ask someone to have a look at the switch logs, It seems strange that an I/O error from a tape drive cause problems on disks, something may happens on the SAN, and the logs may tell you something

[Adib Ahmad]

yes, we have had the same issue as described by you, speaking to hp but no resolution as yet. It seems to bed down after a few shutdown and restarts. We have replaced the gbic on the sanswitch where the msl6000 was connected as there were quite a few errors logged on the port. we have also run the fibre channel utility to reset the registry under HKLM > SYSTEM > CURRENTCONTROLSET > SERVICES > CPQKGPSA > PARAMETRS > DEVICE > DRIVE PARAMETERS...
which should be set to...
Enabledpc=1;queuetarget=1;Queuedepth=15;Topology=2;NodeTimeout=10;LinkTimeOut=40;HLinkTimeOut=5;ElsRetryCount=6;SimulateDevice=1;ResetTPRLO=2;EmulexOption=0xAA00;ErrRetryMax=0;
NOTE resetTPRLO=2 should be set.
these settings are for multipath and extended configuration only, this may be different for you.
other recommendations by HP are to upgrade secure path to 4.0b for windows with sp4.
create the LUNS on the san with default MAX_READ_CACHED_TRANFER_SIZE=32 AND
MAX_WRITE_CACHED_TRANFER_SIZE=32.
make sure the MSL is plugged into port 0 of the sanswitch and therefore persistent bindings can then be removed using lputilnt.
make sure all luns have a preferred_path=(this or other) as when the hsg's a restarted they can be load balanced when started, instead of one controller doing all the work and the other doing none.