W2K Issues

[Douglas R. Taylor]

We have a 3 W2K servers connected to a san which then each server is zoned to our XP1024 for external disk. The servers could see the disk for a little while but suddenly the disk is visable but in the w2k disk manager is says the disk is unreadable. SAN looks good and nothing changed. We are using LightPulse HBA's from Emulex on the w2k side and the w2k event viewer is indicating errors on all 3 cards. Any suggestions about resolving this issue would be greatly appreciated.

[Ron Singler]

Are you using the full port or miniport driver? We've had a lot better luck using the full port driver with persistent binding.

[Mike Naime]

It sounds like you may have overwritten the original disk signatures that W2K made for the SAN drives. Hopefully you have this file saved on a backup that you can restore from.

Is this a w2k "CLUSTER" If so, make sure that your quorum file has not been trashed. This has happened at least twice with our Compaq W2K "Clusters" They do not like to play nice on the SAN. I do not have this problem with VMS and AIX.

If you ask Microsoft, This is a known windoze issue, and not a SAN problem. :-)

[Peter Mattei]

In order to run your environment properly and in a supported way you need to isolate the LUNs to the owners. W2k ???thinks??? that all visible LUNs are his own and writes to it! Since all 3 servers do that you get corrupted data.

LUN isolation can be done in different ways.
1. Connect each W2k server to an individual XP1024 port either directly or through a zoned SAN and only map the LUNs belonging to an individual server to its port.
2. Use Secure Manager XP. This is selective storage presentation. With Secure Manager you can share a FC port on the XP and selectively present LUNs to individual hosts only.
3. Use the Allocater software product out of the HP OpenView Storage Area Manager suite (SAM). This is a host based filter driver that also does selective storage presentation.
4. Build a W2k cluster. The cluster will do the locking and assure integrity.

Also see my attached drawing.

Cheers
Peter

[Eugeny Brychkov]

Upgrade HBA drivers to at least 4.82a14. If you use emulex HBAs download it from emulex website, if HP FCA HBAs then from HP site (driver's name is CPQKGPSA)
Eugeny