RAID Controller/Manageability

[jmo]

Dave,

we're using Areca controllers, which for the larger models (you didn't say how many drives you're going to attach) have an extra Ethernet port for out-of-band RAID management including SMTP notifications and SNMP. An on-the-box agent for the cards is included in the DSS package, which is capable of SMTP notifications, too. Haven't tried that with DSS, though. (I've been using that on the box agent with other Linux installations without problems).

Regards,
Jens

[tingshen]

do consider Adaptec's "Zero maintenance" series.....I got a pair of 5805Z.

[pfeifferl]

Not an answer to your question, but be careful, DSS v6 failover cluster has issues with Hyper-V failover cluster yet (BSOD of VMs when doing iSCSI failover on DSS). At the moment you must put your VMs to saved state before you can failover on DSS. I hope open-e is working on that problem ...

BTW: We use also Areca controller which works well with DSS.

[tingshen]

Not an answer to your question, but be careful, DSS v6 failover cluster has issues with Hyper-V failover cluster yet (BSOD of VMs when doing iSCSI failover on DSS). At the moment you must put your VMs to saved state before you can failover on DSS. I hope open-e is working on that problem ...

BTW: We use also Areca controller which works well with DSS.

pfeifferl, you meant if the primary DSS is turned off, all the VMs will go into BSOD when the secondary DSS is taking over the job?

[pfeifferl]

During the failover/failback there is a short outage in iSCSI connection. There are lots of error events in Windows event log (e.g. "Initiator failed to connect to the target." ...) on cluster nodes and the cluster disks are going offline and online again. Only a few seconds, but the VMs running on cluster (with CSV) are crashing a few seconds after that occures.

I've opened a trouble ticket at open-e support, but no answer yet ...

So my workaround is to save the VMs, doing the DSS failover and start the VMs again. It's bad for a HA scenario, but the only way at the moment ...

[tingshen]

During the failover/failback there is a short outage in iSCSI connection. There are lots of error events in Windows event log (e.g. "Initiator failed to connect to the target." ...) on cluster nodes and the cluster disks are going offline and online again. Only a few seconds, but the VMs running on cluster (with CSV) are crashing a few seconds after that occures.

I've opened a trouble ticket at open-e support, but no answer yet ...

So my workaround is to save the VMs, doing the DSS failover and start the VMs again. It's bad for a HA scenario, but the only way at the moment ...

You're using Supermicro + Areca, not sure if it's related, but mine is Dell R710 + Adaptec 5805Z. I will try out the fail over sometime and let you know if it would also crash all the VMs due to lost in iSCSI connection. I will need sometime....

What you mentioned is not a workaround.....if your primary DSS fail, that's it. Are you running any SCOM + SCVMM to auto reboot all the VM when the secondary DSS takes over successfully?