HPE MSA 2040 - degraded system due to degraded disk (number of disk errors in excess...)

[it_faber]

Hello everyone,

we have one MSA 2040 with two controllers and 49 disk drives (two of them SSDs) running in our company.

Five of the 49 disk drives are configured as "Global Spare".

We are planning the end of life of the system in the upcoming May - we're gonna start moving the virtual machines and other data that are on the SAN system to two newer SAN systems very soon.

I'd really like to get your advice on how to react to the disk drive errors on one of the HDDs:

I'm tending to replace the affected HDD with one of the global spare drives since I'm afraid that the performance of the whole system might go down with the defective HDD still in use.

So - what's the best practice of how to replace the defective HDD with one of the global spare HDDs? Do I just hot swap the defective disk and exchange it with one of the disks configured as "global spare" or do I have to make any further configurations on the web interface of the controllers?

Since we are not plannning with a long continued use of the system I think 4 global spares remaining should be enough and we will stop using the system asap.

Thank you very much for your thoughts and advices.

Here's the warning we get sent from the system:

Degraded System: action required (SN:**Confidential info erased**)

System Status indicates a degraded system.

Failure to take action may result in loss of availability or loss of data.

Log into system to determine corrective actions.

    "show systems" output:

System Information

------------------

System Name: san2

System Information: MSA2040-SSD

Midplane Serial Number: **Confidential info erased**

Vendor Name: HP

Product ID: MSA 2040 SAN

Product Brand: MSA Storage

SCSI Vendor ID: HP

SCSI Product ID: MSA 2040 SAN

Enclosure Count: 2

Health: Degraded

Health Reason: A subcomponent of this component is unhealthy.

Other MC Status: Operational

PFU Status: Idle

Supported Locales: English (English), Arabic (العربية), Portuguese (português), Spanish (español), French (français), German (Deutsch), Italian (italiano), Japanese (日本語), Korean (한국어), Dutch (Nederlands), Russian (русский), Chinese-Simplified (简体中文), Chinese-Traditional (繁體中文)

  Unhealthy Component

  -------------------

  Component ID: Disk 2.16

  Health: Degraded

  Health Reason: The system determined that the indicated disk is degraded because it experienced a number of disk errors in excess of a configured threshold.

  Health Recommendation: Monitor the disk.

Success: Command completed successfully. (2024-02-25 00:01:00)

Best wishes

it_faber

[ArunKKR]

Hi, 

Remove the disk 2.16 out of the array by 1-2 inches.

I believe its part of a RAID disk group which is FTOL (Fault tolerant and online).

You may verify disk group status using the below command:

show disk-groups

The global spare will kick in and rebuild will start on the disk group, if the global spare disk and failed disk have identical specifications.

You could either replace disk 2.16 with a new drive or place a hard drive blank in its slot after removing failed drive.

[ArunKKR · Accepted solution]

Hi , We wanted to follow up and check if the suggestions helped in resolving the issue. Request you to please respond with a Yes/No. You may also click on "Accept as a solution" button if the issue is resolved.

[it_faber]

Yes, this resolved the issue. I'll mark the topic as "resolved". Thank you very much for your help.

Best wishes

it_faber

[Sunitha_Mod]

Hello @it_faber,

That's excellent! 

We are extremely glad to know the issue has been resolved and we appreciate you for keeping us posted.