DSS FC write problems

Good Morning,

OK, I went port to port from Xen to DSS and it worked fine. Then I wen back through the switch and it is NOW WORKING. No changes were made to the FC HBA's or switch.

Any thoughts on how this could be??

mike

Perhaps it was a problem with the auto-setup inside the switch?

Maybe set the ports to Point to Point first the other, not sure as I am light on the FC switch end as I dont have one.

Hi hughesmikea

Your I/O Gaurd is is that still set to Auto, if so please try manual setting.
Someone told me before that fibre channel switch settings must be manualy set.
and do not leave any set to auto.

Hi Guys,

OK, I have played with every setting under the sun and reset everything to factory defaults (not that much was changed to begin with). Right now I am at factory defaults on the switch and HBA's and everything is working perfectly.

At one point today, I shut down everything so I could take the FC card out of DSS and reflash it. When I brought it backup up, the write issue came back. At that point I started playing with all the settings to see if it would make a difference. Nothing did. I set everything back to defaults and the problem was still there. Then without shutting anything down, I reset, through the switch admin GUI, the port DSS is plugged into and the issue went away. And before you ask, I statically setting the speed to to 1, 2, and 4GB and it did not make a difference, nor did the i/o guard.

My conclusion is either a port syncing issues on the switch or a driver issue on DSS. From a lamen's perspective, I would sway towards driver, because we not have this issue with SANMelody and the same server. But like I said, I am a lamen when it comes to FC and drivers.

A couple of thing I found through all of this that would be nice to have resolved or added are:

1) Any time you make a change in the Fibre Channel config you have to reboot the server. This is definitely not good for a production environment.

2) When initializing a new volume the performance of all the other volumes comes almost to a halt. I initialized a 2TB volume today, which took quite some time, and the 15GB volume I was testing with became pretty much non-functional. Again, this is something that is not good for a production environment.

3) The Qlogic CLI (Ctl-Alt-F) is not there, so to make any changes to the FC HBA you have to shut down the server and do it through BIOS. Even then you cannot change all the possible settings and troubleshoot.

4) The ability to see what Initiators are connected to a volume (with statistics) would be really handy. Both FC and iSCSI

5) The ability to see the auto generated name of a volume. This is the one the initiator sees in its discovery of LUN's.

6) The ability to change the name of a logical volume or set it at the time of creation.

Thanks for you help. Let me know what you think.
Mike

Mike - Thanks for the update!

I also want to thank the guy's on the forum especially for contributing to Mikes needs.

I think Mike makes some very good points and we are aware of these issues already and wanted to let you that our engineers review the posts as well.

So if you can give us some time to let our FC guy work on making it better in our future releases then we will have this done with a better price point then our competitors :)

Mike - Do you know how much faster we where from the Datacore rates, would be good to know for the guys who helped out as well. I know Robotbeat would love to know :) as well.

Another thing i discovered about setting up some fc target is Machine Zoning,
I mean make a zone for each machine connected to the lun even if you share your volume through multiple machine. On Qlogic switch like sanbox2, do not enable I/o guard on your target machine.

My setup work like a charm with a metasan controller.