CMC-warning: alarms may not be available

[phillbl1]

Hi, I have just installed a left hand san, 2 servers, 2 storage nodes, Raid 10 and configured the failover manager on a seperate server.

I have configured the management group, site, added the torage, presented etc.

The strange thing is, where the alarms are displayed it always says, warning: alarms may not be available. The issue may be due to a momentary communication interruption with the network..... blah blah The system will continue to attemp to communicate blah blah

Is this normal as its only a warning or could it be that i have missed something?

Thanks

[Fred Blum]

I have only seen that message after the SANiQ 9 update and reboot and treated it as a boot sequence issue.

Can you check the alarm date and time?

[phillbl1]

I have just upgraded my SANiQ and rebooted them.

Check the date and time of the alarm? This is not an alarm that is listed and i cant do anything with the message. Its just listed in status in the alarm section.

I have also just noticed the when i click on servers the site tab has Upgrade to use in the tab. Any idea why this is? I have updated everything i think.

Thanks

[Fred Blum]

You are right I checked and it is not logged under events. You might check the service bundle export logs if it is logged anywhere and want to be sure. I am taking it as a termporal thing as I only noticed it after an upgrade reboot, never came back, abnd alarms are functioning.

[Mark Sakamoto]

I too, have the same "alarms may not be available" in the status area of the alarms section. I didn't think twice about it till I attempted to do a patch upgrade.

The upgrade fails with the error "there was a problem getting the alarm list for the management group xxxx"..Canceling all futher installations.

Would these be related? The alarms are fine in the event log.

I have the upgrade selection mode on advanced and see there is only one patch for the p400 so not concerned about it.

Just worried about future upgrades with this error.

[Willem Wismans]

I'm having the same problems. I installed 2 nodes, CMC 9 and updated the CMC. When I want to update the nodes it returns the same error.
Don't know if the alarms where not vissible before the CMC upgrade..

Help needed!!

See my attachement for the full error when I click it.

[Jitun]

I think you will see the message if u have updated CMC to 9.0 but the Nodes are on 8.5 or lower.

Note if there are any firewalls or security programs in use. For example, note whether Windows firewall is active (try disabling it as a troubleshooting step) and what, if any devices might be in between the CMC and the SAN.

[Willem Wismans]

Hi Jithu,

Your answer is correct, this happened when I tried upgrading. The CMC is in v9 now, but the nodes are not. When I want to upgrade the nodes, al these messages appear.

When I rebooted the nodes, some messages disappear, but I'm still stuck with the message on both nodes: "CIMServer" server is currently "down" and upgrading the nodes failes.

[Willem Wismans]

Hi All,

I eventually ended up restoring both nodes.. HP couldn't fix this issue. Because I had the opportunity to restore (few data on the storage) I tried this. Complete restore and new management group & cluster and after the config the udates the problem was solved!

Willem

[Rafael Fonseca]

Just to add my 2 cents:

Bought a brand new P4500 Virtualization SAN (2 physical nodes + 10-pack VSA).

They came pre-installed with SANiQ 9. The "Alarms may not be available" message persists, and attempting to install patches on the management group fail with "Could not retrieve alarms".

HP Support Tier 3 has been working on it for over a month now, with no solution.

I made the decision to go with the LeftHand solution instead of comparable NetApp and EMC offerings because all of the people I spoke to raved about the ease of use of the software. But I'm not impressed at all with how hard it has been to set these up.

VSA is a another beast. For some reason, trying to add a VSA to an existing management group comprised of only physical nodes causes the CMC to enter a never-ending loop.

Somehow, I think the issue causing the alarms to not be available (even though they show up) is causing all the other problems I'm seeing (including not being able to turn on SNMP).

:(

[David Lockett]

We have 6 brand new version 9 P4500s and the MG they are in exhibits the same issue.

Have a job logged and it is working its way up the food chain, but any news of a fix other than total destruction?

[Rafael Fonseca]

David,

Don't bother with total destruction. I've completely reset all my nodes (including the VSA) and the problems persists.

Sasme boat: case logged with support, up to tier 3 (and possibly developers) now.

[Jitun]

I THINK there might be a Patch to resolve the issue...
Dont quote me on this though :)
Dont have an ETA for it now.

[RobertJ]

I have also an issue: we have a cluster with 2 P4500 G2 SAN IQ 8.5, and a cluster with 2 P4300 G2 SAN IQ 9. After upgrading the CMC to version 9 we have the display: warning: alarms may not be available...

This is to the old management groups witch are on version 8.5. We are not planning any upgrade due to the remote copy's.

Does anyone have a solutions for this?

[Jay Cardin]

I can confirm the same problem. I have two SANs, 2 P4500-G2's and 4 P4500-G1's. Both are running SAN/IQ 8.5 and are being accessed from CMC 9.

[phillbl1]

hi, not really related to my original post but i just updated my LHS storage to version 9 and then installed the 3 seperate updates that come after and it destroyed my csv cluster so i had to rebuild it. Basically my cluster was unable to see the disks. if anyone else has this please let me know... just interested if it was me or the software that messed up :-)

[phillbl1]

and one last thing. on the LHS the alarms seem to hang around... the clear button is greyed out so i am unable to delete them even though they are very old alarms. whats that all about.

[Jitun]

phil, The Alarms in SANiQ 9 Clears itself once it is resolved.

It would remain in the Alarms Pane till it is resolved.

[Jitun]

I would Suggest Logging a Call with HP for the Alarms issue.

But I would suggest making sure that the networking follows best practices first.


First, look for connectivity issues.

Please check on the Node, Switch and Host Server
1.) Enable Flow Control on network switches and adapters. Flow control ensures a receiver can make the sender pace its speed and is important in avoiding data loss. (Recommended)
2.) Ensure Spanning Tree Algorithm for detecting loops is turned OFF. Loop detection introduces a delay in making a port become usable for data transfer and may lead to application timeouts.
3.) Segregate SAN and LAN traffic. iSCSI SAN interfaces should be separated from other corporate network traffic (LAN).
4.) Use Non-Blocking switches and set the negotiated speed on the switches.
5.) Disable unicast storm control on iSCSI ports. Most switches have unicast storm control disabled by default. If your switch has this enabled, you should disable this on the ports connected to iSCSI hosts and targets to avoid packet loss.
6.) Configure additional Paths for High Availability; use either Microsoft MPIO or MCS (multiple connections per session) with additional NICs in the server to create additional connections to the iSCSI storage array through redundant Ethernet switch fabrics.


7.) Also note if there are any Firewalls or Security programs in use. For example, note whether Windows firewall is active ( try disabling it as a troubleshooting step) and what, if any devices might be in between the CMC and the SAN.

[Aaron Weller]

We have a similar issue (and have a support case open with HP regarding it):

1. First noticed the issue that when CMC was logged into one of our 2 P4500 G2 nodes it would not show the alarms, however when logged into the other node it would show the alarms.

2. The issue got a little worse when we attempted to upgrade the Management Group with the latest patches. We get an error message: "Management group 'xxxx' has the following issues: There was a problem getting the alarms list for management group 'xxxx'.. Canceling all further installations.

3. We then used the "Support Upgrades" method of installing patches individually from the files however we received exactly the same error message.

Jitin, do you know if there is an update that can fix this - and if yes, how is the update applied?

[Jitun]

Please Log a Call with HP as the Patch is Support Only Patch.

[RobertJ]

Alarms are for 9.0
Alerts are for 8.5

So the notification that alarms may not be available is correct for the 8.5 nodes.

Upgrade to 9.0 and the warnings are gone.

Regards Robert

[Stefano Colombo]

Hi ,

I have the same problem.

6 P4500g2 nodes configured as 2 multisite clusters ( 4+2 ) .

All came with SAN IQ9.0

I've upgraded the CMC to the lastest and ran the upgrades of nodes .

After a while (11%) the installation stuck with the error "there was an error while getting alarms .."

I have the option of pressing F11 to halt the upgrade but wonder if that would screw up my installation

Anyone has any Idea ?

thanks

[Emilo]

Hello,

This is an know issue and should be fixed in one of the updates.

It can only be fixed by support if you contact them via a putty session.

In addition to this you need to make sure that you have only 1 way of the san as this can cause communication problems.

In other words no multi honned.

You also need to look over you network configuration very carefully.

[Stefano Colombo]

Hi Emilio
I already have logged a call to HP but the engineer , it seems, is not aware of this issue and that there a support fix
Can you tell me the fix I should mention to the engineer ?
As per multipath . Do you mean is not supported during upgrade or at any time ?
We have esxi hosts attached via iscsi with multipath and by white paper is supported