Apple XRaid questions

Question

I inherited an environment with a couple of apple xraid san.

1 - I have a 14 drive setup that's split into 5 LUNs on EACH side. The SAN goes into a fibre switch along w/ the servers that are attached to it. LUN masking is enabled on the SAN and as far as I know, there aren't any zoning on the fibre switch. Question, I have a server that's assigned two LUNs, one from each side of the controller. For some reason, it only sees one LUN (from the upper controller) and it doesn't see the one from the lower controller. The controller seems to be working fine as I have other servers attached to LUNs on the lower controller.

2 - I see a little "disclaimer" saying that any changes to the xraid will result in a reboot. So, if I add/remove hosts, this thing is going to reboot?!?!?!

Answer 1

The reboot warning on the XRAID sounds quite extreme to me but I've never worked on one so I'd heed the warnings unless someone qualified tells your otherwise.

Before you look for problems on the SAN side are you sure you have done everything you need to get the Server to rescan for new storage? Newly presented storage may not be automatically detected and you may need to give it a nudge (or two, VMware ESX used to need to rescan for new storage a couple of times before finding new LUNs for example).

As far as general FC advice though what I can say is that since you can see some LUNs from both controllers and see at least one LUN on the affected server you know that all the physical parts (SAN FC ports, SAN<->Switch cable, all relevant Switch Ports, SAN<->HBA FC Cable and Server HBA) are working. That leaves LUN Masking on either the server or the SAN or a Zoning config issue on your FC switch (or if you have 2 switches then on the FC switch connected to the lower controller). It's unlikely to be a problem with the controller in any case as if there was a failure in a controller the LUNs should trespass to the other controller, you would still have a repair problem but the LUNs should still be visible.

My recommendation is to double check all LUN masking and check zoning on the Fibre switch(es). I'd also add that I think that implementing zoning would be a good idea in any case but again you should get advice from someone who is an expert with the XRAID on whether that actually is the case.