Hardware Status: Major Fibre Card Loop Failed

[Jennifer Taylor_4]

First: I apologise I posted this in the IM7 forum but didn't know how to delete/move it.

I cannot get the Hardware Status in my BLp blade enclosure with enhanced backplane and using BL30p blades off of Major. It's not the NICs that are the problem it's the Fibre Cards. All of my blades boot from SAN (MSA1000) and I only have one fibre cable per blade but it calls for 2 per blade. The MSA doesn't have enough fibre ports for dual lines per blade. So until we get a fibre switch I would like to get the Hardware Status to green.
The specific message is under "Storage" - "External Storage Connections" under the second listing (the first listing status is ok and green) for the "Fibre Channel Mezzanine Card G3, BL3x p Series" I get:
Status: Loop Failed
Any help or ideas greatly appreciated. I would think disabling it would work but wouldn't that disable both of the connections since it's through the enclosure?

[Rob Buxton]

I'm not familiar with the FC Cards that you use, we have separate cards in non-Blade Servers.
We do have NICs that have dual ports and you can certainly disable a single Port on those which we do for exactly the same reason.

And as you boot from the SAN, testing what happens when you disable one isn't without some risk.

[Peter Sonander]

You have to disable the port, the problem is to figure out wich port is being used. At least in windows I have not found a way to get that information.

[Jennifer Taylor_4]

Does anyone out there know how to tell which port to disable. I can find both of then in Device manager under SCSI but it doesn't tell me which one is working (it says they're both working) although one of them has the drop menu "device usage" blank and disabled (greyed out). I've tried the bios and the second FC is disabled but it still shows up in windows device manager? Like Rob mentioned if I disable the wrong one I won't have an OS or anyway to get it back. (maybe switching the bios settings to use the other FC would get the os back...)

[Jennifer Taylor_4]

Ok I finally took a chance with a test blade and disabled the second qlogic fiber channel adapter listed in 2k3 device manager. It worked and it also worked on all my other 5 blades.
Thanks for all your help :)

[Jennifer Taylor_4]

The second adapter was the inactive one. Disabled via device manager and now I'm all green :)