Unmounting Raid through LSI and SANBOX 5600

[philrichardson]

Hello

I am in the process of preparing to set up our XSan across the facility of 8 workstations for Media post work. The small initial setup i am prepping includes a Q-Logic 5600 switch. The Macs I am using have Apples LSI 7202 cards in them.

My problem is that the RAID appears on the desktop, then, after about 25 seconds, umounts. Here is what i have done:

# Put Streamguard on enable
# Reduced port speeds
# Swapped out the cards
# Tried several transceivers
# Posted bulletins and asked questions everywhere
# Reinstalled and updated switch firmware to latest set
# Updated FCUtility for MAC - such use as it is - cant locate new drivers for hba
# I am speaking with QLogic but they seem at a loss.

If i place an ATTO card in the MAC, everything is fine, but not with Apple's LSI card. There must be something that card is saying to the swittch that overrides streamguard and causes an interrupt that drops off the Raid.

Has anybody any clues or has anybody got a 5600 in their setup with Apple HBAs? If so, please tell me your settings as i am pulling my hair out in great clumps.

Many thanks for any help.

Philip Richardson
MD Pogo Films Ltd
Soho
London

[dan-o-matic]

When you say that the 'Raid mounts on the desktop', are we talking about an XSan volume here, or an XServe RAID (or LUN of it) that is still unformatted or HFS formatted or something? What stage of the setup are you currently at and what machines are the ones that this fails on (Mac Pro/ XServe's etc.)?

[philrichardson]

Thanks for replying...

The XSan is still comfortably in its box. All i am doing at present is checking all of the equipment that will go to form our XSan. So what i have is two Infortrend EonStor Raids (5TB per Raid) sending four fibre links to the switch. (the raids are striped and raided to appear as a single drive) It is MAC OSX formatted, not UFS

Into the switch also comes two copper links (Apple cables). These connect to the Apple HBA (7202 PCI X) insinde the dual 2.5 Mac. This machine has had a fresh ground up re-install with all of the latest drivers available (except HBA as you can't update these other than through the os updates apparantly).

In this MAC i have tried the Atto card we have - all works fine. Put the Apple HBA in and it fails. It seems to have a connection with data rates as when i run a sample film at SD quality, it stays mounted for about a minute or two, but at higher resolutions and data rates, it fails much quicker. It could be a co-incidence, but i don't feel it.

I had identical issues with this switch and various other Macs in the house. We have a pair of quads in the grading / online suites. The Raid unmounted with the Apple cards in those, but put the atto in and they were fine.

We cant afford to buy a dozen atto cards just like that and why should we when the apple hba should be fine. Is it my switch? The firmware is the latest.

Phil

[philrichardson]

Me again...

I should also add that thi sissue manifests on more than just the 2.5 Dual. The Quads in the grading suites exhibit this behaviour with PIC-E apple HBAs.

Ta

[dan-o-matic]

I've seen 'non-Apple' Raid boxes fail to mount before, when you leave every option on the fibre board on automatic. You mentioned having tried different fibre speeds before, but was this on the Q-Logic or on the Apple cards. My experience with i.e. G-Speed disks and Apple HBA's is that you have to use 'Fibrechannel Utility' to manually set the port bus to 4 gbit. You might have to try out to manually set the link speed (to 2 Gbit? with these cards?) on both the card using fibrechannel util, and on the switch using the sansurfer tool. Maybe you also have to manually set the topology, trying never hurts, but I've never had to change this from automatic before. Good luck.

[philrichardson]

Thanks Dan

I have been through a careful list of changes and changed speeds of HBA through FCUtil and after that list of try-outs, then gone on to adjust port speed changes off auto - no dice.

Just had a couple of good folk from 10dot1 in for a chat (gratis - good guys!) and they feel the issue may be with the way the two Eons are raided together, this was done through MAC OS. Quite why the Atto card should be so happy about it, i don't know.

So i now have to extract 6Tb of data to another Raid and re-format and try that. Although, i have a slight feeling that when i have.....

[dan-o-matic]

well, if you're about to build an xsan volume on these boxes anyway, you would also have to get rid of the 6 tb of data. I've no hands on experience with the Infortrend boxes, so don't know what fibrechannel kind of settings are in there (if any at all). If you have a chance in the process of reformating, you might want to try and see if you can build a (temporary) xsan volume on them and see if that works with the apple hba's.