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Sunday, December 12, 2010

Fixing a Cisco UCS B-Series RAID-1 mirror disk when configuration status is stated as “Unknown” in UCS Manager

A few months ago, I was asked by a friend about a strange problem he encountered when working with Cisco’s UCS B-Series servers where navigating to a server’s Inventory –> Storage tab, he’ll see one of the blade server’s local disk’s status stated as unknown:

Disk 2

ID: 2

Product Name:

Vendor:

Revision: 0

PID:

Serial Number:

Block Size (Bytes): unknown

Number of Blocks: unknown

Size (MB): unknown

States

Operability: N/A

Presence: equipped

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The server is otherwise running fine and reviewing the event logs within UCSM does not show any errors.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to assist in troubleshooting since it wouldn’t be ethical for him to give me access so I told him I’ll try to mimic it in our test environment when I get the chance. Since I was spending some time on setting up a NetApp earlier in our datacenter and there were 2 test blades that I was using with no critical applications on it, I thought I try to mimic this.

Testing Procedure

First off, our UCS chassis, FI, blades, etc were on firmware version 1.3(1n):

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I had been thinking about how I could recreate this error for a few weeks and what I came up was to try and destroy the RAID 1 by pulling out the 2nd drive to see if I’ll end up seeing this error. After proceeding to pull the drive and then inserting it back in, I noticed that the 2nd drive had the LED light turn to yellow:

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Seeing how there is now a visual warning, I proceeded to log into UCSM to check the disk 2 in the inventory –> storage tab of the blade server and it indeed showed the status as “unknown”:

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The first thought I had in mind was that the RAID is now probably in a degraded state and since this information wasn’t provided in UCSM, I decided to reboot the server and go into the LSI SAS controller to see what the status was.

Note: Unfortunately, I got tied up with a few things so I didn’t end up getting back to this till 5 hours later.

Restart the server:

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If you have quiet boot turned on, you won’t see the option to get into LSI SAS controller utility so make sure you turn it off by going into the BIOS:

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When you see the LSI SAS controller being displayed, hit Ctrl-C to get into the utility:

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What I noticed was that going into the RAID Properties and reviewing the RAID status, the controller actually does not list it in a degraded state:

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***This could possibly be because the 5 hour delay of continuing this test meant the controller automatically rebuilt the RAID which means I will have to try doing this test again to determine if this is true.

Seeing how the RAID was in good health, I logged back into UCSM to check the status of the drive to see if it has changed but it looked like nothing has changed:

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Logically thinking about service profiles and how they’re applied to servers, I suspect that the hardware information is pulled from the B-series blade when the service profile is originally applied and based on the behavior I see here, it doesn’t look like it refreshes periodically.

So what now? The first thing I could think of was try to re-acknowledge the server because by doing so, the chassis will perform a rediscovery and possibly pull the hardware information again.

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As indicated with the following warning message, make sure you don’t have anything critical running on this blade as the server will get rebooted:

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I’ve always found it fascinating to look at the FSM tab for some reason:

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Once the re-acknowledge task completed, I navigated back to the inventory –> storage tab and now I can see the information for Disk 2.

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Once I get more time again, I’ll try to update this post with the results of not having a 5 hour delay between breaking the RAID and going into the SAS controller to check the RAID status.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Terence thanks for the Awesome Posting! I just ran into the same issue and followed your steps and got it working!

Thanks a bunch!

Grzeg said...

Thanks buddy for the great and very well documented postage! It helped me to fix the unknown disk status.