Apollo 2000 solid amber LED on drives

[uzimmermann]

As HPE support is useless, I have been trying for weeks to get information out of them, I will ask this here.

i have two nodes in two different chassis where one node each has two drives each with solid Amber LED. These systems run Cohesity software, I,e, CentOS modified, and use standard AHCI mode on the SATA controller for the front 12TB drives. The LED is actually on the backplane, so it is controlled by the system. 

The guide to the LEDs on the Apollo says a solid amber led is a critical drive failure, yet these drives are online and operating. S.M.A.R.T. Counters do not indicate anything which would label them as predictive failure either. As these system use AHCI SATA adu does not work. I now had the drives replaced on one node and guess what? The LEDS are still amber.

So what controls these LEDs on the back plane, especially when you don't have a raid controller installed.

[support_s]

System recommended content:

1. HPE Apollo 2000 Chassis - LED Indicators

2. HPE Apollo 2000 Gen10 Chassis - LED Indicators

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[AmRa]

When AHCI SATA mode is enabled, the hard drives are managed by the Advanced Host Controller Interface.

In this case, please let us know the storage status from the iLO web console for further recommendations.

[uzimmermann]

ILO reports just green status, AHS shows nothing, yet I have 2 nodes with 2 drives each with solid amber LED. These nodes are in two separate chassis (node 2 in one chassis, node 4 in the other chassis).

These systems run Cohesity/CentOS, so only the basic Linux utilities to check. S.M.A.R.T. also shows nothing out of the oridinary really when comparing against drives with no amber LED.

[AmRa]

This issue need deep log analysis and multiple troubleshooting step. Hence please raise support ticket with HPE support team for further assistance.

[uzimmermann]

See my opening post ... I said support has been useless. I have a case open for over 2 weeks. At this point I am just looking for someone who actually understands the Apollo hardware architecture and knows how the amber LED can be controlled when the system uses the onboard Intel SATA controller in AHCI mode (SATA controller is part of what used to be called Southbridge).

[Krisro]

Pls check with Cohesity because the LED's are controlled by the 'OS' in this case Linux/Cohesity layer.

Typically these SW controlled storage solutions like Cohesity, Simplivity, Qumulo .... are the ones who control the disk (HDD or SSD) LED's and not the HW (Controller, backplane ..) this is only so when in RAID mode . SW defined storage solutions use their own error counters and thresholds to decide when/why a disk status LED should be AMBER/ RED and their logs should contain a trace when and why they decided to put a certain disk as faulty. This is clearly not a pure HW issue, proven by the disk replacement which changed nothing to the LED status.

If a disk itself detects his pre-defined error counter threshold crossed (i.e. media errors, no spare blocks remaining etc) then the disk itself will bring up the AMBER LED and report a Predicitve Failure status, with associated SMART trip, this does not seem to be the case here from what I read. When such a disk is replaced, the new disk will come up clean.

When a disk is replaced in a SW defined storage solution, there are always some actions to perform at the OS level to indicate the disk is replaced.

Hope this helps.

[uzimmermann]

I have checked with Cohesity and they say they just use S.M.A.R.T. to warn about drive failures or if the OS reports errors. They says they don’t do anything with LEDs. So I am still looking for how can these LEDs be controlled in such an environment, because the HPE support ticket has been open now for over 3 weeks with no results.