Connect HP Storageworks M6412 Fibre Channel Drive Enclosure directly to Server?

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BinaryLimited

796 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#1031681 26-Apr-2014 16:53

Mark: Been ages since I've done what you want to do (so old school ;-) ... the chassis is probably just a FC arbitrated loop internally, jump into the BIOS of the FC HBA and make sure it's set to FC-AL and not point-to-point and then see what drives appear.

There's no school like the old school. Will give it a try and let you know the outcome.

Binary Limited - Safe. Secure. Simple. ™
www.binarylimited.co.nz

BinaryLimited

796 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#1031736 26-Apr-2014 18:49

BinaryLimited:
Mark: Been ages since I've done what you want to do (so old school ;-) ... the chassis is probably just a FC arbitrated loop internally, jump into the BIOS of the FC HBA and make sure it's set to FC-AL and not point-to-point and then see what drives appear.

There's no school like the old school. Will give it a try and let you know the outcome.

Been doing diagnostics on the HBA ( Qlogic QLE2460 ) ...which always shows as "Link Down"
after reading a few articles , iv noticed that all the lights (3) are blinking on the HBA.

Apparently this means that the drivers are not installed ( which they are ), or the drivers are wrong.
iv downloaded the correct drivers.
Changed the fibre cord

And still no luck?

any ideas?

Binary Limited - Safe. Secure. Simple. ™
www.binarylimited.co.nz

pschulz01

1 post

Wannabe Geek

#1732511 7-Mar-2017 13:52

I was able to get the following to work together:
- HP ProLiant DL580 G7 Blade Server; with
- 2x Brocade 8G Fibre Channel Cards (now QLogic) - 815
Model 815. Single Port 4Gbps/8Gbps
PCI Id: 1657:0017 (rev 01)
Fibre Channel: Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. 415/815/41B/81B 4Gbps/8Gbps PCIe single port FC HBA (rev 01)
- 2x Brocade 8G GBIC

- HP StorageWorks M6412A Drive Enclosure AG638B
M6412A Fibre Channel Drive Enclosure
2x HP GBIC

- 2x Fibre Cable (OM3 1m)

Notes:

- The Brocade FC cards needed to be set to 4Mbps from Brocade BIOS
when the server is booting.

- They also needed to be set to use arbitrated loop (FC-AL) mode in
order to talk to the disk tray. This was done by downloading and
booting from a liveCD[1] and using the 'bcu' command line utility[2]
for each of the HBA interface cards (1/0 and 2/0).

bcu port --topology 1/0 loop
bcu port --disable 1/0
bcu port --enable 1/0

The open source linux driver in Ubuntu 16.04 (bfa) appears to work
well once the cards are configured correctly. The 'bcu' utility does
not work with the opensource modul, but will work when booted from
the LiveCD and the vendor supplied modules.

In addition, I installed the dm-multipath utilities
(multipath-tools)[3] which allows multiple fibre connections to be supported.

References
[1] QLogic Download page
https://driverdownloads.qlogic.com/QLogicDriverDownloads_UI/resourcebyos.aspx?productid=1208&oemid=410&oemcatid=135967
- Multi-Boot Code LiveCD(ISO) - live_cd_v3-2-3-2.iso

[2] Adapter Administator Guide - Also available from QLogic Download page

[3] Linux DM Multipath
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_DM_Multipath
https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/dm-multipath-chapter.html

Other Discussion:
See: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?topicid=143701
- Arbitrated loop, rather then point-to-point?

Redit Thread
- https://www.reddit.com/r/storage/comments/3pyexh/using_a_hp_storageworks_ag638a_standalone/
- http://www.reacttant.com/r/storage/comments/3pyexh/using_a_hp_storageworks_ag638a_standalone

WillowMan61

2 posts

Wannabe Geek

#1733236 8-Mar-2017 19:37

Well done getting the M6412 disk enclosure to work.

However, it is untested and not supported. I would not trust my data on something like this.

The M6412 was designed for storage systems and may not behave the way you want it too.

The largest disk drive the enclosure would operate, is a 2TB disk. That is assuming the firmware code is running reasonably current <3yrs old.

If you need disks, please feel free to PM me.

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