Windows 2003 Cluster on MSA2312sa

[Ed Thaine]

Hi, I was wondering if anyone can help with this:

We are in the process of setting up a Windows 2003 cluster using the following hardware:

2 x Proliant DL360 G6
1 x MSA 2312sa G2

The servers each have 1 SC08Ge host bus adapter for connectivity to the MSA. We are not using multipathing as this is a test environment. The servers are connected to the array exactly as recommended in the HP guides. The arrays created on the MSA are presented as read-write to all ports (default) and when the servers boot, both can see the arrays in question. No other servers are connected to the MSA.

Both servers are fully patched to SP 2.

Now here is the problem:

We power down the second node and install Microsoft Clustering on the first node as recommended in all the docs. Everything seems fine. However, when we power on the second node to join it to the cluster, during the boot process the server detects the SC08Ge controller and attempts to connect to the five arrays. For each array we get the message: "Device not available at HBA0". As the shared storage cannot be detected by the hardware, we cannot continue with the cluster installation.

We have used these MSA's on two other clusters in our production environment OK. The only difference is the other clusters have G5 servers as opposed to G6's.

A colleague and I have checked the BIOS settings etc and can't find anything specific in the BIOS that could be causing this issue.

We have rebuilt the servers, reinstalled the HBA drivers, tried and exhausted every suggestion on the web so far, but still cannot get MS Clustering to work.

If anyone has any suggestions or tips I'd welcome their input. Many thanks

[Ed Thaine]

Bizzare!

We re-applied the Service Packs/Hotfixes to both nodes and rebooted - everything is now working.

Don't really know what happened here - we tried the Service Packs before and it didn't work so looks like a classic Microsoft hiccup; we're keeping an eye on it for a few days before we go to the next stage of installing SQL.