Creating a Storage Policy for RAID1 for M7 & M5 servers

[JDMils]

For our new M7 UCSX servers managed under UCSM, I created a Storage Profile and associated Storage Policy to take the 2 local SSD disks and make them a bootable RAID1 LUN. My setup is this:

Storage Profile:
Name: pro_sto_local
Auto Config Mode: Unspecified (on M7s it HAS to be this setting else it won't work)
Local Luns:
Name: boot_lun
Size: 1GB
Fractional Size: 0
Auto Deploy: Auto Deploy
Expand to Available: Checked
Select Disk Group Configuration: pol_stor_raid1

Storage Policy:
Name: pol_stor_raid1
RAID Level: RAID 1 Mirrored
Disk Group Configuration: Manual
253
254

This setup works well with the M7 servers as the disks on the servers show as 253 & 254, however when I apply this same setup to our M5 servers, I get the error:

Failure Reason: There are not enough resources overall.
Insufficient disks for the specified raid level
Drive does not support specified size

When I look at the physical server's disks, they are ID'd as:

Disk 1
Disk 2

I assume I need to change my Storage Policy to Disk Configuration (Automatic)? Do I have to set anything specific or can I leave all the settings as default?

Since this setup is already applied to all the M7 servers, if I change the Storage Policy, will it affect the M7 servers such that they will lose their disk contents or will they just need a reboot and be running ESXi again without any issues?

I'm running 4.3(4a)A firmware on UCS-FI-64108 FIs.

[JDMils]

Since the Storage Profile/Storage Policy is already applied to the M7 servers, I assume I cannot edit them now? I tried and get the error:

Disk group qualifiers and local disk config references are mutually exclusive

[Matthew Faiello]

Greetings....

Since you are dealing with 2 x different Server Storage Architectures (M7 and M5), to make things easy, I would recommend leveraging Service Profile Templates (if you are not using them already) ...one for M7 Server Storage Configurations, which capture you existing Storage Policy/Configuration and one for M5 Server Storage Configurations which will have a different Storage Policy Configuration.

If you haven't created Templates, you can create one from a reference Service Profile and leverage M7 in the name.... make sure all your M7's are attached to this Template accordingly,

You can also create the one for M5, and make sure M5 is in the name...of course this Service Profile Template would be using a different Storage Policy/Configuration, so it will need to be changed. You can change that once you build the storage policy for your 253/254 disks below. Once created, make sure all your M5's are attached to this Service Profile Template (assuming all your M5's are the same storage-configuration-wise)

Hope this helps.... the Below guidance has you manually setting the disks as 253 and 254

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/servers-unified-computing/ucs-b-series-blade-server-software/217962-configure-ucs-m2-hwraid-on-ucs-blades.html

[JDMils]

Hi Matthew, yes I am heavily involved in creating Service Profile Templates, Storage Policies/Profiles, vNIC templates etc. The way I have the Storage Policy setup atm is to create a RAID1 array using the disks 253 & 254 which are the first 2 local SSD disks on our M7 servers. I was hoping you would say that if I changed the Disk Group Configuration from Manual to Auto that I would be able to use the same Storage Policy/Profile for both M5 & M7 servers.

[Matthew Faiello]

JD, I'll confirm and get back to you asap....

[SabariG · Accepted solution]

"Auto Disk Selection" will work in this scenario with certain conditions. The disk selection will happen based on the available disks. UCSM will select the first available set of disks for LUN creation. So, if the server has only M.2 controller with disks in 253,254, RAID1 LUN will be created using 253 and 254. But, we need to make sure there are no other available disks in this server.
The same Storage Policy will create RAID1 LUN on disks 1,2 if these disks are available on a different server.

[JDMils]

Thank you, that's what I wanted to hear.

I am concerned tho, if the servers did have more then 2 disks installed. I assume the Storage Profile would try to make all disks RAID1?

The problem is that some controllers, like the ones in our M7s, do not accept the Storage Profile Auto Config Mode to be anything other than "Unspecified". What this means is that ANY disk can be used for RAID1 creation, whether JBOD, Unconfigured Good. Shame on that! (Cisco UCS VIC 15420/UCSX-ML-V5Q50G)

[SabariG]

In the "Disk Group Configuration(Automatic)", you can specify the number of drives to be 2. This will limit the LUN to use only 2 drives.

Regarding "Auto Config Mode"  not being forgiving i.e. to ignore if not applicable to the server/controller, let me check with the team & see if this can be addressed.

[JDMils]

I've already logged a TAC case for the Auto Config Mode which has to be "Unspecified" and we came to the conclusion that this is the only supported method for that specific controller.

Any other config setting will result in the error when applying the SP "Unsupported Destructive Change".