Mapping logical array drives to Windows disks

[James Burwell]

Hi,

I have a HP Proliant ML370 G5 running Windows 2003 Server R2.

It has two HP P400 Array Controllers on it, each with a few arrays and logical drives defined.

What I'm trying to figure out is how to figure out which Logical drive corresponds to a windows disk presented to the OS by the controllers and shown in the disk manager snap-in.

That is, I'm trying to find a utility or application which shows me this relationship:

Array Controller <-> Array <-> Logical Drive <-> Windows Disk <-> Windows partition/drive letter.

I couldn't find any way to cross reference this using the ACU, ACU Diagnostics, or Insight Manager combined with the windows properties, etc.

Is there something I'm missing (sorry if this is a dumb question ... I'm more a Unix/Linux/Netowrk guy).

Thanks,
Jim

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello James,

take a look at the properties of the disk drives that you can see in the disk manager snap-in. You will find the bus number 0the target ID and the lun number. The lun number is identical with the number of the logical drive in the ACU.

Hope that helps.

Best regards,
Patrick

[chongkan]

Since this is just one server you can do teh following:

Open ACU and select physical view, it will tell you wich drive belongs to each array and the drive slot..

To figure out which drive is which one in windows:

Once you have identified wich drive belongs to each array you can shut the server down and partialy move ( 1.5" ) All drives from the same array ( Server must be OFF )

The boot to OS and see what is the missing drive..

Shut the server down again and place all drives back in their original slots.. ( push them back )

The RAID config in those drives will load up properly..

This can be done only with drives belonging to the same array at HW level.. if one RAID contains more than 1 logical drive this cannot be done.

[James Burwell]

Hrm. I've tried to find a correspondence like this before. But it just isn't there. Here's some more info. There are five logical drives, three on "Smart Array Controller P400 in Slot 1" and two in "Smart Array Controller P400 in Slot 4".

In the ACU (7.60.18.0), the slot 4 controller is listed first. When I click on slot 4, I see two SAS arrays, A and B, each containing logical drives in the "logical view". The logical drives are numbered 1 and 2 respectively.

When I click on Slot 1, I get a similar display, with three arrays defined, A, B, and C. Each containing logical drives 1,2,3 respectively.

Obviously, the logical drive numbers overlap on each array, so THESE can't be used to identify the drives based on the windows bus/target/LUN view of the logical drives.

Window's view of the drives is as follows:

Diskman disk#, Drive letter, Bus/Target/Lun
Disk 0, C:, 0/4/0
Disk 1, F:, 0/5/0
Disk 2, T:, 0/4/0
Disk 3, E:, 0/5/0
Disk 4, G:, 0/6/0

Obviously, there's ovlap here too in the SCSI IDs. The Bus is 0 for all 'of 'em (presuming this is the PCI bus, not the SCSI bus). If I had to guess, I'd say that these correspond to the ORDER in which the drives appear in the ACU, since there are two logical drives 4-5, followed by three, 4-6. The sizes of the windows disks also match the logical disks. But I'd like a concrete and more empirical way of identifying these drives.

Unless, perhaps, this IS the way they're identified? The order presented in ACU is identical to the order presented in disk manager?

As a side note, the Insight Manager Also has a disk view, and it lists "Logical disks #" along with drive letters. But they don't coorespond directly with the ACU or disk manager disk #s at all, or target #s. And they're numbered 1-5. The same page lists "logical volumes" which number from 0, and repeat. Maybe they should call it confusion manager instead of insight manager. ;-)

Anyway, why can't HP provide a tool that shows the correspondence of the host-side drives as presented to the OS, and the array controller, array, logical disks? Figuring this out shouldn't be like solving a puzzle.

[James Burwell]

Chongkan, thanks for your reply. That's definitely one way to figure it out. Process of elimination.

But I don't think it should be required to bring down your system and rearrange drives just to try to ferret out which logical disks are which windows drives.

- Jim

[chongkan]

Can you provide a screenshot of the ACU's physical view? Attach it to the thread..

[Village56]

Jim,

I have just posted a very similar question, but I think I have just found the answer!

If you open the "System Management Homepage" and select storage you will get a list of the controllers in the server. From here, you can drill down into the logical drives on the various controllers and one of fields is "OS Name" - quite obvious when you know where to look! ;-)

Regards,
James