B200 M3 only shows 1 FlexFlash Card

[josephdevaney]

I have a B200 M3 blade running 2.2(1c) firmware.  I have a 16G SD card installed in both slots.

If I navigate to the equipment tab, expand my chassis and select the server then choose inventory and select storage, FlexFlash Controller 1 says my Physical Drive Count is 2.  If I expand the FlexFlash Cards menu below that it only shows FlexFlash Card 2.

My Controller health says SD253 Card with Unpartitioned or SD247 Card.  FlexFlash 2 card says its card type is SD253 card.  I pulled the cards from the server and the model numbers are the same.

I am not sure if there is some sort of format or firmware flash that needs to be done to the card directly, and if there is, I am unable to find how to do that in the UCS GUI Configuration guide v 2.2

[Keny Perez]

Hello,

Can you tell me what the "RAID State" and "RAID Health" say?  If the system sees only one working card, RAID State will be “Disabled” and RAID Health will be “NA” (Not Applicable).

You can enable RAID State Reporting through Local Disk Policy cause it is disabled by default

If your card is showing SD247, is very likely you will need to format the card with a "FlexFlash Scrub" which is provided in Scrub Policy of the Service Profile, this will format the HV partition using FAT32 and erase its contents (for both cards), so backup your data if there is important info there.

I hope this helps.

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Kenny

[josephdevaney]

RAID State says disabled and RAID Health says not reporting.  I'll go ahead and create a service profile to enable those things, as well as a scrub policy to format the cards and go from there.

[Keny Perez]

OK, let us know...

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Kenny

[josephdevaney]

I created 2 new policies.  1 local disk and 1 scrub.  At some point I got a message notifying me of a config failure. The failure reason was:

'server does not fulfill local disk config requirements of the service profile.  There are not enough resources overall.'

Once I changed the Mode back to Any Configuration from RAID 1 Mirrored, everything was fine.  Server applied the profile, rebooted, came back up.  I am still seeing a couple issues though

RAID State: Enabled Not Paired
RAID Health: Degraded
Controller Health:  SD253 card with unpartitioned or SD247 card

I am only seeing one card, Card 2.  I am also seeing a couple faults which I have attached.

Am I mistaken in believing that both cards should have formatted on reboot based on the scrub policy?

[Keny Perez]

I am not sure if that is the reason why you did it, but to mirror the SD cards you do NOT need to specify "RAID 1" in the policy.

Set a scrub policy only for the Flex Flash and format the card with that policy

-Kenny

[josephdevaney]

Ken,

The reason I did that was because I assumed RAID1 needed to be selected to mirror the cards.

I can't seem to find any definitive documentation in the UCS GUI Guide 2.2 pertaining to formatting flexflash drives. I read through 'Configuring Scrub Policies' and that is more or less what you've already mentioned here.  I created a service template that included those policies, then created a service profile from template, then associated the service profile to a blade.  I thought that process would apply those polices, but, I must be mistaken.  Could you point me in the right direction?

[Keny Perez]

OK, I see... well, when you create the scrub policy the SD/BIOS/Disk is not "wiped out" until you disassociate the Service Profile so the card is not formatted when you associate the SP but formatted when you remove it, so the advice will be to disassociate the Serv Profile that includes the scrub policy you created.

HTH

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Kenny

[josephdevaney]

When I disassociated the profile, I didn't get a prompt to confirm the disassociation because of my scrub policy.  I do get this for other polices (ones that just have Disk Scrub), but not this one, which is just set to FlexFlash Scrub.

I proceeded with the disassociation, but, upon re-association, I am still seeing the same thing as above in regards to the raid status and health.

[Keny Perez · Accepted solution]

It will be a good idea to open a case with TAC and take a look through a Webex meeting, we might be missing a click here and there that is keeping us away from solving this OR, this could be related to a failed SD card cause when there are 2 good cards and the FlexFlash is enabled, the RAID is supposed to be automatically set up.

Please don't forget to paste the solution here for future users reading this post

-Kenny

[josephdevaney]

So it looks like one of our SD cards might have been bad.  I had several cards that were slated for other blades and I took 2 different cards and put them in the blade I've been working with, inventory now shows both cards.

[Keny Perez]

Nice, thanks for the feedback, that will help others see all you tried and how it ended up.

Please mark the thread as resolved so future users can see you got this resolved.

-Kenny