3

I have a HP D6000 (sometimes called MDS 600) storage array, HP DL380p G8 with an LSI 9207-8e SAS adapter.

When I am in the OmniOS (Solaris 10 fork), I can e.g. dd to one of the disks, but I don't see the HDD led flash. On the front of the storage array are the HDD leds with numbers,

enter image description here

and they never light up. I suspect they should be green according to the manual:

Green: The drive is online, but is not currently active.
Off: The drive is offline, a spare, or not configured as part of an array.

If I enter the LSI setup, then I get can get number and HDD to light up using the test feature.

Question

What does the offline message above mean, and how do I active them, so I can use the disks as a JBOD for ZFS?

1
  • What OS are you running?
    – ewwhite
    Jun 25, 2014 at 13:16

1 Answer 1

3

You'll want to look into implementing some of the SES commands. SES stands for SCSI Enclosure Services, and is the protocol used by external JBOD storage enclosures to report health and do things like illuminate disk LEDs. Nexenta has sesctl, but there are other third-party options like SmartMon-UX.

Are you actually using real Solaris, or a ZFS-based derivative? The appliance solutions (Nexenta, QuantaStor, etc.) already have this support in place.

Example NexentaStor JBOD layout below:

enter image description here

Edit:

You probably won't be able to get this working with your OS/controller/enclosure combination. Be vigilant about monitoring your actual disk pools and label your drives (with the last few WWN digits) in the event you need to replace a disk.

5
  • Very nice. It is actually OmniOS I am using. Jun 25, 2014 at 13:28
  • 2
    You can get the lights working in any OS that supports SES, but it wont be automagical. There's some effort being put into adding this to ZFS (I'm actually working on this in FreeBSD; but I doubt it will make it back up the tree and into OmniOS for a while unless someone else ports it in). If you have access to a SES tool, send 0x80 0x80 0x00 0x00 to the drive's SES Object to get the Green light. Also useful/interesting in HP disk arrays are "Ident" (Blue light) = 0x80 0x00 0x02 0x00; "Failure" (Solid Amber) = 0x80 0x04 0x00 0x00; and "Rebuild" (Blink Amber) = 0x80 0x02 0x00 0x00.
    – Chris S
    Jun 25, 2014 at 13:46
  • 1
    @ChrisS That's useful. The third-party and integrated appliance solutions have a motivation to make this work. But it's good that you're contributing to the open-source effort.
    – ewwhite
    Jun 25, 2014 at 13:53
  • @ChrisS Very interesting! Does there exist a bug report I can subscribe to? Jun 25, 2014 at 14:28
  • 1
    If there's a bug open I don't know of it. ZFS's "main" bug reporting system is here: illumos.org/projects/illumos-gate/issues . FreeBSD's "Problem Reports" generally doesn't track feature requests, as this would be.
    – Chris S
    Jun 25, 2014 at 15:01

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .