David Warburton

This statement is becoming almost cliche in the blogging world, but this post is more for my own benefit to help me remember some of the work I’ve been doing on MSA lately:

The MSA 2000 series has a pretty dire web interface – when you compare it with other SAN’s – and to make matters work, it mixes and swaps terminology with HP’s own EVA’s (a vdisk on an MSA refers to a RAID array made up of physical disks. A vdisk on an EVA is a virtual RAID array which sits on top of the underlying RAID 0 structure). The web interface is challenging enough as it is when it works, but recently the web page of the management interface has been timing out.

Thankfully SSH access still works and responds well. I’ve been using…

restart mc a

…to restart the management interface which helped things for a short while but ultimately I found myself falling back to SSH more and more.

The following procedure follows the steps I took to rename and prevent a volume to a host.

To give a host a friendly name (from its WWN):

set host-wwn-name host <wwn> <friendlyHostName>

To rename a volume:

set volume <volName> name <new_volName>

To view what hosts a volume is currently presented to and what volumes map to what hosts:

show host-maps [<friendlyHostName>]
show volume-maps [<volName>]

To actually present a volume to a host:

map volume <volName> [lun <lunID>] host <friendlyHostName> access rw

In theory the LUN ID can be left blank, but in practise I found that it would not map unless I specified an ID. Don’t forget to map both HBA’s for a host.

After presenting the volume to the Windows 2003 host I was dismayed when the Storage MMC could not see the new lun. Hitting F5, of course, was not enough. On the Disk Management section folder in the left hand side of the MMC window, right-click and select Rescan Disks.

I’ll update thist post if I use and feel the need to remember some other command line options for the MSA 2000 but hopefully we’ll be migrating off it to EVA soon!