InfoScale 7.1 and large disks (8Tb) with FSS

Hi everyone,

I had been successfully running FSS with (thin) 8Tb disk drives on SFCFSHA 6.1 and 6.2.1

(see: http://vcojot.blogspot.ca/2015/01/storage-foundation-ha-61-and-flexible.html)

I am trying to reproduce the same kind of setup with InfoScale 7.1 and it seems to have issues with 8Tb drives.

Here's the full setup description:

2 * RHEL6.8 hosts with 16gb RAM.

4 LSI virtual adapters, each with 15 drives.

c0* and c1* have 2Tb drives.

c2* and c3* have 8Tb drives.

Both 2tb and 8tb drives are 'exported' and the cluster is stable.

Here's what I noticed.. Creating an FSS DG works on 2tb drives but not on 8tb drives (it used to on 6.1 and 6.2.1):

[root@vcs18 ~]# /usr/sbin/vxdg -s -o fss=on init FSS00dg  ssd_2T_00 
[root@vcs18 ~]# vxdg list FSS00dg
Group:     FSS00dg
dgid:      1466522672.427.vcs18
import-id: 33792.426
flags:     shared cds
version:   220
alignment: 8192 (bytes)
local-activation: shared-write
cluster-actv-modes: vcs18=sw vcs19=sw
ssb:            on
autotagging:    on
detach-policy: local
dg-fail-policy: obsolete
ioship: on
fss: on
storage-sources:  vcs18 
copies:    nconfig=default nlog=default
config:    seqno=0.1027 permlen=51360 free=51357 templen=2 loglen=4096
config disk ssd_2T_00 copy 1 len=51360 state=clean online
log disk ssd_2T_00 copy 1 len=4096
 

On the 8Tb drives, it fails with:

[root@vcs18 ~]# vxdg destroy FSS00dg
[root@vcs18 ~]# /usr/sbin/vxdg -s -o fss=on init FSS00dg  ssd_8T_00 
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-585 Disk group FSS00dg: cannot create: Record not in disk group
 

One thing that I noticed is that the 8Tb drives, even though exported, do -not- show up on the remote machine:

[root@vcs18 ~]# vxdisk list|grep _00
ssd_2T_00    auto:cdsdisk    -            -            online exported
ssd_2T_00_1  auto:cdsdisk    -            -            online remote
ssd_8T_00    auto:cdsdisk    -            -            online exported
 

One other thing to note is that the 'connectivity' seems a bit messed up on the 8Tb drives:

[root@vcs18 ~]# vxdisk list ssd_2T_00|grep conn
connectivity: vcs18 
[root@vcs18 ~]# vxdisk list ssd_2T_00_1|grep conn
connectivity: vcs19 
[root@vcs18 ~]# vxdisk list ssd_8T_00|grep conn
connectivity: vcs18 vcs19 
 

That's (IMHO) an error since those 'virtual' drives  are local to each of the nodes and the SCSI busses aren't shared

vcs18 and vcs19 are two fully independent VMWare machines.

This looks like a bug to me but since I don't work for a company with a vx software support contrat anymore I cannot report the issue.

Thanks for reading,

Vincent