NO ACCESS to shared storage - Please help

[Ayman Altounji]

I had my CL380 cluster running. Since this is my first server I was experimenting with what applications I should run on it. All of a sudden for no apparent reason the cluster wasn't working any more after I restarted the nodes. Also the shared disks aren't shown in disk management any more. After trying several things I decided to reinstall node 1 and leave node 2 off. But even after that I don't have the disks of the shared storage system. The only strange thing is that the compaq CR3500 utility does see the physical disks and the logical drives.

Has anyone had the same problem ???

[Ayman Altounji]

We had the exact same problem that you describe. We did two things to resolve it. First we replaced the CR3500 with another CR3500 controller (we only had one controller in the box). Second we defined the Host in the configuration to 0 and the LUNs to 1 and 2 since we had two logical drives. The controller gave no indication that it was bad but we did have a spare available for our use. Hope this helps.

[Ayman Altounji]

Thanks for responding. I have been thinking of a hardware problem from the start. One more question though. Those settings you applied where can I make those ? I don't have a spare CR3500 so I want to see if those settings would help. Else I have to let compaq replace the controller.

[Ayman Altounji]

Under Compaq System Tools you will find the CR3500 Array Configuration Utility. If you go to SCSI and then go to the properties of your logical drives and make sure that each one is set to a unique ID. We didn't check this before we had swapped out the CR3500 so I'm not sure that it was incorrect to start with. Hope this helps.

[Ayman Altounji]

Thanks for your help. But those settings weren't needed. The CR3500 unit was replaced and the disks were back right away. It was what I originally thought was the problem and you confirmed. Compaq said it was a software problem and let us down for 3 weeks. Thanks to your replay we forced them into replacing the CR3500 and it was the problem. I am disappointed in compaq for not knowing this.

Once again thanks for your help.

[Ayman Altounji]

You do NOT need to replace the CR3500. All you have to do is power down the server and shared storage, reset the cr3500. There is a hole in the front of the cr3500 and you will need a paper clip to reset the controller. After resetting the controller, power shared storage on and let it initialize. Power on 1 node and boot to OS. Go into the cr3500 ACU, double click on the logical drive and click the settings tab. Change the host port to 0 and lun to 1. You should then be able to see the shared storage. I would still recommend calling the Cluster tech support team for Compaq.