Dear Netland,
I was asked to summarize my posting regarding the disk capacity
problem I was having trying to see a 45 GB disk array through the
SWXCR controller.
It turns out that there is about a 30 GB limit to a logical device in
the SWXCR controllers. This requires me to create and initialize two
logical devices to get the whole 45 GB. I will try to put the device
on a F/W controller and off the SWXCR.
For those who asked, I was not running a F/W SWXCR controller because
there were none certified when we established this configuration. We
put the 3 channel SWXCR's in the system as the only means of having a
supported configuration. We then ran our disk arrays as JBOD.
The reason I didn't discover these problems earlier is that we just
upgraded from 20 GB to a 45 GB array. I was replacing logical device
zero, but had some RZ29's configured as RAID 5 arrays using logical
device 1 and 2.
My mistake was that I just upgraded the JBOD drive to 45 GB and
initialized it. I didn't delete the original JBOD definition because
it would require that I rebuild all of the other RAID 5 arrays and
play with tape. I initialized the 45 GB drive, but the logical device
definition in the SWXCR controller remained at 20 GB, the size of the
original JBOD device.
What did I learn? When we create a logical drive, the SWXCR
controller appears to query the drive to get its capacity. It then
records the capacity of the drive in the SWXCR controller, even if it
is JBOD. Initializing the logical device simply reads the
configuration in the SWXCR controller and doesn't requerry the device.
When building a label for the logical device, the disklabel command
querries the device, but instead of querring the actual disk, it gets
a response from the SWXCR controller that tells it the disk capacity
at the time the logical device was created, not when it was
initialized.
Moral of story. You have to go back and wipe out all arrays to get to
the bottom one, even if it is JBOD. How nice, because I'm still out
of production while the SWXCR initializes what is now about 80 GB of
drives.
My thanks to those who responded, Keith
Received on Fri Nov 14 1997 - 21:50:52 NZDT