AX4-5I... stuck!

Could you provide additional information:

1. What version of the Flare is running on the array?

2. What occurred - did disk 0.1 fail?

3. What steps did you take after the disk failed? Did you replace the disk with a compatibly replacement?

4. What was the part number of the failed disk and the replacement disk?

glen

Disk 0.1 is one of the four Flare disks.  You can't move those disks around, the proper functioning of the array depends on them being right where they are.  If one of them has a fault you need to replace that disk with a valid spare (it is not a 'special' vault spare, any good AX4 disk of the same type and equal or larger size will do), and wait for the unit to rebuild.

On an AX4 you may have also used the portion of the disk that isn't occupied by Flare to build a RAID group, and provision user LUNs.

That can cause some issues...

If a Flare drive faults in an AX the write cache for the unit probably disabled.  If there is user data on the disk then the unit would try to invoke a hot spare to rebuild that data.  But it will not attempt to rebuild the Flare portion of the disk on any disk in any slot other than the original location (0.0 - 0.3).  And without write cache the rebuild of the user data will be ... the word "glacial" is a good description.

So the unit is stuck working on the user data rebuild, and even if you replace the faulted Flare drive, it will not start the rebuild of the Flare, until the user data rebuild has completed.

While your mileage may vary, this process can literally take days.

The best (often in retrospect) option is to not put any user data on the flare drives.

The second best...or possibly worst...is to go to the cache properties tab of system properties and uncheck the HA cache vault option.  That action will allow write cache to remain enabled if a vault drive is faulted...but doing that will create opportunities for writes to be 'lost' if further failures occur.  I should mention here that if you are already in a situation where a vault disk is faulted that you can not change this setting...

Thanks for your answer.

1- Flare version is:

2- I don't really know why the disk failed. The problem is that I actually changed him with a new disk but nothing happens.

3- Yes I did, but as I said, the disk remain in "misplaced".

There is a way to manually set the disk? I tried with Unispehre, Navisphere web & cli but I can't do nothing.

I tried also to reimage the SP, but nothing changed.

Also I tried to make an hot-spare, but that disk isn't rebuilding.

Also, when I try to do the Hardware Replacement disk trought Unisphere, this is the output:

The Disk Drive Replacement Wizard is not supported with the targeted storage system's version (02.23.050.5.709) of the Operating Environment.

The wizard requires one of the following versions:

Release 02.16, patch 0 or higher

Release 02.17, patch 0 or higher

Release 02.19, patch 0 or higher

Release 02.24

Release 02.26

Release 03.22, patch 0 or higher

Release 03.24

Release 03.26

Release 02.28

Release 03.28

Release 04.28

Release 04.283

Release 04.29

Release 04.30

Release 05.31

Release 05.319

Release 05.32

Release 05.33

Please let me know if you have more tips.

If you have the original disk that you removed (the one that failed) check that the part number of the failed disk matches the replacement disk.

For the replacement disk was this a new disk? Or did you remove it from an unused slot?

If you pull out disks 0.1 (the second disk) the array should still boot up (I'm assuming it's still running) - when disks 0.1 fails, disk 1.3 is a mirror image of disk 0.1 - when the system boots it will use disk 1.3 to boot SPB. When you replace a Vault disk, it should start to rebuild the Vault part of the disk from disks 0.0.

The disk replacement utility is called Navisphere Service Utility (NST). I'm not sure that is still available on support.emc.com.

Are you using NaviExpress or Full Navishere? Unispherer is not supported on the AX4.

If you have NaviExpress, go to the Components section - at the bottom, look for "View Replacement Help  Library" and click on "Replace Disks" - this is the help section for replacing disks.

The latest Version of Flare for the AX4 is 23.711 - once you get the disk fixed, you should upgrade the Flare to the latest release.

glen