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February 23rd, 2019 20:00
PS4210 - switch active and secondary controllers status
I have an Equalogic Dell PS4210.
Two Controllers each have their own dedicated switch
my master switch (SW0005) is having issues and I need to restart it, however, the Controller (Slot 1) is currently active.
my backup switch (SW0006) is ready to go and connected to the Controller (Slot 0) and currently secondary
How do I force Controller Slot 1 (currently secondary) to become the Active controller so I can work on the switch connected to it ?
We have two vmware hosts in a cluster connected to the SAN and I can't stop them. Can this controller switch be done in a live production environment?
If a minute or so is needed for the switch to happen and the VM's would stay online, that would be great.
thanks
dwilliam62
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February 24th, 2019 03:00
Hello,
For proper cabling, each controller should have been connected to each switch. Then an inter-switch link (ISL) between the two switches. Using 2x trunked 10GbE links. So both switches will be active at the same time.
This insures proper redundancy at all levels.
If you have set the proper time outs in your VMs, and configured VMware per our best practices handling the failover should not be a problem. Located with the firmware downloads is a document which discusses the Disk TimeOuts for Windows and linux.
This Tech Report covers how to confgiure VMware.
https://downloads.dell.com/solutions/storage-solution-resources/BestPracticesWithPSseries-VMware(TR1091).pdf
To restart the array, go to the member, under the Maintenance tab there is a button to restart the controller. This will force the active to failover to the passive.
I would suggest you do this in a low IO period for fastest failover times.
However, it sounds like you might to take an outage to correct the networking.
Regards,
Don
Eric813
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February 24th, 2019 15:00
everything was set up with ProSupport so I can only assume that's what they did. I will double check tomorrow.
what threw me off is that the controller ethernet ports are not active when in standby. i'll be good tomorrow to just pull the plug on the first switch that is acting up and the secondary switch will still take over the communications..
i won't have to worry about the SAN controller just yet.
dwilliam62
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1.5K Posts
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February 25th, 2019 01:00
Hello,
re: Passive Controllers. That's correct. The passive ports are always dark. They have to be. They will inherit the IP addresses from the active but have different MAC addresses.
Regards,
Don