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How to power down a Dell PowerEdge 2850 with an attached StorageVault 220s and HP StorageWorks Ultrium 1840
Hi All, My boss who had been here for 29 years passed away from a massive heartattack and unfortunately left no documentation on our servers, storage devices, etc. and never included me in any of their configuration or setup. My last Server OS I worked with was MS 2000 so I'm not completely illiterate on server management just very rusty.
We have 4 physical servers, three of which are running 2008 r2 core and Hyper-V with a total of 16 virual servers and I'm learning them as we go but there is one older server I'm having trouble with right now that needs to be dealt with. I believe it was due to be retired over the holiday break but I'm not sure on that. Anyway, I've inherited the responsiblity of keep our whole network, systems and users functioning and happy. So here is my question............
The PowerEdge is running MS Server 2003 and I know how to shut it down but I'm not sure the process I need to do to shutdown the attached StorageVault and StorageWorks tape drive. After I do a shutdown on the PowerEdge (and does that take a while because of the attached storage array?) do I just hit the power button on the StorageVault and StorageWorks or is there a shutdown process for either or both of them? If so can you tell me the steps to do it? I've googled till I'm blue and find everything but how to shut down a storage array.
I'm the only IT support here for 200 people plus the burden of learning what he didn't document or share with me which is alot with more coming out of the wood work every day. I'm a bit busy to say the least with no additional help in the foreseeable future. Now the backup is failing which obviously I need to fix as soon as I can.
I am getting backup errors on the StorageWorks. I've cleaned the drives many times with used and then new cleaning tapes. The next step is to shut the whole system down and reconnect cables. It's an older system but has over a Terabyte of information on it. I'm not able to get a good clean backup and need to get this resolved as soon as possible. The LTT for the HP doesn't recognize it's attached drives so I can't check for firmware updates but would think with it's age that it's firmware is uptodate as he was good at doing that. If the shutting down the system and reconnecting the cables doesn't work then my next step will be to try to determine the firmware version. I could try to move the data to a new server setup he had started but that breaks a whole bunch of scripts he wrote that affect all of our users so that's not a good option either at this time. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Please ask questions if I haven't been clear on something! Thank you!
DELL-Sam L
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January 10th, 2014 14:00
Hello WendyN,
Here is what I can recommend for your issue. In regards to the PV220s & the PE2850 the way dell says that it is best to them down is to power down the server first then once the server is off then wait about 2 minutes & then power off the PV220s. The reason that you want to power off the PV220s second is that any writes that are stored on the controller card that is in the server that the PV220s is connected to will flush all the data to the PV 220s. That normal only takes a few seconds but I have found that if you give it a couple of minutes to flush all the data that you can ensure that all the data was written.
Now for you HP StorageVualt & StorageWorks Tape library I am not sure on. But what I can tell you is that with our Tape libraries we recommend that you power off the server first then power off the tape library.
Now as far as turning on everything you are going to want to do it in reverse order. First I would power on the PV220s & the tape library & wait for them to come to an idle or ready state. For both of these that should be about 5-10 minutes. Once that is done then I would power on the PE2850. The reason is that if the PV220s doesn’t present the arrays that are on it to the controller card till it is fully up. Now your tape drive is a little bit the same as most tape libraries will do a scan of the slots & see how many tapes are in it along with homing the taped drive & then it will present the SCSI id’s to the controller card that it is connected to.
Here is a link to the User’s guide just in case you don’t have it. ftp://ftp.dell.com/Manuals/Common/powervault-220s_User%27s%20Guide_en-us.pdf
Please let us know if you have any other questions.
DELL-Sam L
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January 14th, 2014 07:00
Hello WendyN,
No there is no services that need to be shutdown prior to shutting down the server. Just make sure that when you power everything back up that you do it as stated above so that everything is seen again correctly.
Please let us know if you have any other questions.
WendyN
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January 13th, 2014 07:00
WendyN
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January 14th, 2014 19:00
Hi Sam, Ok after last night's backup failed to start, tonight after everyone left I shut down this system as directed in your instructions above giving each device plenty of time to complete what it needed to do. I started everything back up in reverse order as directed but I am getting error email messages galore now!
There is nothing in the Event log on the Server but there is in the BE event log. It tells me "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Scsi\adpu3202. So I found an update on the internet for that scsi adapter and I updated the driver. There are two of those scsi adpaters on this server. They are each running driver version 7.0.0.6 1/22/2007
I also did a windows update on the server (there were 23 but nothing hardware related) and checked for updates for BE (that was/is up to date). Rebooted everything as directed above and now I keep getting the same error but a new one as well. "The device \Device\Scsi\mraid35x1 did not respond within the timeout period." I'm getting really concerned with this system as I haven't been able to get a good back up now for over a week.
I have pictures of the various boot up screens for the various devices and versions of firmware. Smart phones come in really handy at times like this. So I should be able to tell you what versions everything is currently running.
Both Dell Perc 4/DC & Dell Perc 4e/Di RAID Controllers are at driver version 6.46.2.32 10/28/2004.
This system was running fine up until about 10-14 days ago. I hadn't changed anything before that just because I have enough to keep me busy without running the risk of creating more work for myself until I get up to speed on everything he left behind.
Now I'm waiting to see if the backup will start at 8 pm as scheduled.
Please any suggestions to keep this system up and running a bit longer? Thanks!
As of 8:05 pm one backup job started automatically, I had to start the other job manually but it appears to be running. (There are two single tape HP Ultrium 1840 tape drives) I have stopped getting the emails about the adapters so maybe it just took them a while to get up to speed? Let me know if those are something I need to be concerned about. I will be working on why I had to manually start the one backup job manually, that's an issue but not your issue. Just let me know of the error messages I listed above.
Thanks Sam for your help!
Wendy