[Info-vax] Smartarray 5300 & hot spare

[Carl Friedberg]

Hi,

The SA5300 is a windows and Unix box, which Compaq somehow managed to
get working on VMS (but just barely, IMNSHO). The software is hard to
get working (ACUXE) and there are definitely flaws along the lines of
hot spares. I don't believe hot spares work, period. I have had three
failures (all raid 1, two-member mirrors), with a hot spare, and they
were never brought into the spare set. The old SWXCR worked better.
When I placed support calls, I could never get adequate answers on
configuring a hot spare so it would work as I expected.

It's a nice box in many ways, but you have to shut down VMS and assign
a new drive to the broken raid set; then (assuming the raid set still
is valid) the rebuild will happen.

It's not what I thought I had bought...

Please tell me I'm wrong.

Carl Friedberg

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 6:18 PM, gartmann <gartmann at immunbio.mpg.de> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> we have a SmartArray 5300 controller with 16 disks. The disks are
> divided into three units with five drives each and the remaining disk
> is assigned as a hot spare to all three arrays.
>
> Now one drive failed and the unit stopped workin and therefore the
> drive on OpenVMS failed as well.  I thought the spare drive should
> have been used in such a case? Or what is wrong here:
>
> Unit 0:
> In PDLA mode, Unit 0 is Lun 0.
> Cache status      : enabled
> Max Boot Partition: Unknown
> Volume status     : VOLUME failed
> 1 Data Disk(s) Failed or Removed:
>   Disk 1: (SCSI bus 0, SCSI id 1)
> 5 Data Disk(s) used by lun 0:
>   Disk 0: Partition 0; (SCSI bus 0, SCSI id 0)
>   Disk 1: Partition 0; (SCSI bus 0, SCSI id 1)
>   Disk 2: Partition 0; (SCSI bus 0, SCSI id 2)
>   Disk 3: Partition 0; (SCSI bus 0, SCSI id 3)
>   Disk 4: Partition 0; (SCSI bus 0, SCSI id 4)
> Spare physical drives:
> 1 Spare Disk(s) used by lun 0:
>   Disk 209: (SCSI bus 2, SCSI id 9)
> Logical Volume Raid Level: RAID 5.  Distributed Data Guard
>                           stripe_size=16.0KB
> Logical Volume Capacity : 1117.56 [1199.97] GB
>
> Unit 1:
> In PDLA mode, Unit 1 is Lun 1.
> Cache status      : enabled
> Max Boot Partition: Unknown
> Volume status     : VOLUME OK
> 5 Data Disk(s) used by lun 1:
>   Disk 6: Partition 0; (SCSI bus 0, SCSI id 6)
>   Disk 8: Partition 0; (SCSI bus 0, SCSI id 8)
>   Disk 9: Partition 0; (SCSI bus 0, SCSI id 9)
>   Disk 200: Partition 0; (SCSI bus 2, SCSI id 0)
>   Disk 201: Partition 0; (SCSI bus 2, SCSI id 1)
> Spare physical drives:
> 1 Spare Disk(s) used by lun 1:
>   Disk 209: (SCSI bus 2, SCSI id 9)
> Logical Volume Raid Level: RAID 5.  Distributed Data Guard
>                           stripe_size=16.0KB
> Logical Volume Capacity : 1117.56 [1199.97] GB
>
> Unit 2:
> In PDLA mode, Unit 2 is Lun 2.
> Cache status      : enabled
> Max Boot Partition: Unknown
> Volume status     : VOLUME OK
> 5 Data Disk(s) used by lun 2:
>   Disk 202: Partition 255; (SCSI bus 2, SCSI id 2)
>   Disk 203: Partition 0; (SCSI bus 2, SCSI id 3)
>   Disk 204: Partition 0; (SCSI bus 2, SCSI id 4)
>   Disk 206: Partition 0; (SCSI bus 2, SCSI id 6)
>   Disk 208: Partition 0; (SCSI bus 2, SCSI id 8)
> Spare physical drives:
> 1 Spare Disk(s) used by lun 2:
>   Disk 209: (SCSI bus 2, SCSI id 9)
> Logical Volume Raid Level: RAID 5.  Distributed Data Guard
>                           stripe_size=16.0KB
> Logical Volume Capacity : 1117.56 [1199.97] GB
>
> Regards,
>   Christoph Gartmann
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