Hey guys, I wanted to run some PERC 6/i behavior by the forum and see if it's to be expected.
I have my 6/i running in my ESXi whitebox. It currently has two WD Reds in RAID1. I have the OMSA VIB installed on the host and OMSA Manage Node installed on my PC, which is where I configured the RAID. I was curious how it exactly it would treat a failure, so to test, I deliberately failed one of the drives by pulling SATA power while it was online. OMSA reported a degraded state and one inaccessible physical drive, and the volume stayed online, as expected.
At this point, I reconnected power to the drive, and shortly after OMSA detected both drives as 'foreign'. It did NOT show the non-failed disk as healthy. The only OMSA task I seem to be able to execute now is under "foreign configuration options". As soon as I began the repair, the volume went offline in ESXi. OMSA showed that it began to rebuild the RAID. It remained offline for the duration of the rebuild. Took a few hours. When it was done, I had to reconnect the storage adapter in ESXi, but no data was lost. During this process, the disk that I did not fail was 'OK', while the disk that I failed was the one that went through the rebuilding process.
Here are a couple screenshots I took during this process.
Is this expected? SHOULD the virtual disk go offline during a rebuild? I thought array rebuilding could be performed while leaving the disk online. Is that not true?
I also feel like I should have more options available to me to recover the array. I feel like I should have something like a "Rebuild" option somewhere, such as described here. But, I don't seem to have that (see image three in my gallery with the "no tasks available"). However, I only could perform operations of the "foreign configuration" category. Maybe this is indicative of the way in which I failed the drive? Would a "real drive failure" prompt the controller to behave differently than my physical intervention and disconnecting SATA power?
Just trying to understand my controller better, the manual was not too clear in this regard. Thank you for any help.
I have my 6/i running in my ESXi whitebox. It currently has two WD Reds in RAID1. I have the OMSA VIB installed on the host and OMSA Manage Node installed on my PC, which is where I configured the RAID. I was curious how it exactly it would treat a failure, so to test, I deliberately failed one of the drives by pulling SATA power while it was online. OMSA reported a degraded state and one inaccessible physical drive, and the volume stayed online, as expected.
At this point, I reconnected power to the drive, and shortly after OMSA detected both drives as 'foreign'. It did NOT show the non-failed disk as healthy. The only OMSA task I seem to be able to execute now is under "foreign configuration options". As soon as I began the repair, the volume went offline in ESXi. OMSA showed that it began to rebuild the RAID. It remained offline for the duration of the rebuild. Took a few hours. When it was done, I had to reconnect the storage adapter in ESXi, but no data was lost. During this process, the disk that I did not fail was 'OK', while the disk that I failed was the one that went through the rebuilding process.
Here are a couple screenshots I took during this process.
Is this expected? SHOULD the virtual disk go offline during a rebuild? I thought array rebuilding could be performed while leaving the disk online. Is that not true?
I also feel like I should have more options available to me to recover the array. I feel like I should have something like a "Rebuild" option somewhere, such as described here. But, I don't seem to have that (see image three in my gallery with the "no tasks available"). However, I only could perform operations of the "foreign configuration" category. Maybe this is indicative of the way in which I failed the drive? Would a "real drive failure" prompt the controller to behave differently than my physical intervention and disconnecting SATA power?
Just trying to understand my controller better, the manual was not too clear in this regard. Thank you for any help.
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