SOLVED: Fixing A Broken Intransa System

Do you have a technical IT guy/girl or Data Center guy/girl in your social network that deals with VMware? Most likely he would be able to help you big time. Otherwise....YouTube has some great videos. Just search vSphere Storage Appliance

Good Luck.

Hello Undisclosed,

I may be able to assist you with your problem. First, I assume that you have replace all of the bad drives and now wanting to rebuild your arrays correct? Secondly are you able to login the VSA Storstac GUI? Let me know if you can get this far and we can go further.

I replaced a couple of the bad drives and now all of a sudden it is showing me that there are 2 more bad drives that it wasn't showing before? I tried to just eliminate those drives from the array so I could get this up and running right away in a more limited capacity until I got back with a couple more drives. I deleted the volumes and the bad disks and that led to deleting the disk groups and pretty much everything. I can login to VSA and could assign initiators to volumes and that sort of thing but just don't know the exact process. I used the web based utility to create the volume and assign the dirve letter and I could connect to everything all the way down to assigning the drive letter. It would fail everytime saying couldn't find the target or something.

Maybe I have to replace every failed drive before I can start over? I was assuming that I could just create a smaller RAID on less drives temporarily and then expand or even recreate again when I returned. Right now I have 3-500 GB drives in the VA100 and 10-1TB drives in the Expander.

Thank you for your reply

Hello Carl,

Have you logged into the ISCSI initiator to see if the volume is active or inactive? Chances are this is why its saying it can't login. To see the volume, open “iSCSI initiator” and select the “Targets” tab. Next, click “Refresh”.

You will see the volume that just created. Highlight the target you wish, and then click “Log on”. Check the boxes that say “automatically restore” as well as “Enable multi-path”. Click “OK” if you don’t want to configure multipath/security or move to the “Advanced” settings to configure Multipath and CHAP for authentication. Select “Microsoft iSCSI initiator” for “Local adapter”, then enter the IP address of one of NIC ports used for iSCSI traffic and that are to be selected as the “Source IP”. Finally, select Intransa “iSCSI IP address” as the “Target Portal”. Finish by clicking OK.

Your array would be in a 'degraded' state if there are more than one bad drive. Let me know if this helps.

I see, so we need to start fresh then.

To create a volume for use by the NVR software, you need to use the Intransa VSA-Volume Creation Wizard.
To start, right click on “All Volumes” and then select “New Volume”. There are 4 steps to create a volume.

Step 1 is to provide “Volume name”, “Volume policy”, and “Volume size”.

Step 2 is to create the volume and disk placement policy, and is followed by step 3 which
will ask which NVRs to allow access this volume.

The final step is merely to confirm that everything has been set correctly.

Right click the name of the newly created volume to activate a list of functions that can be performed on this volume. Things like expanding, cloning, snapshot,etc.

The volume is now fully ready for use and you can go back to the NVR software and use this volume for retention and playback of video recording. You can also choose at this point to set up additional volumes, as needed. This should work but you have to get past the ISCI login problem.

Thanks, Dwain! Carl, Can you let us know how it goes and if you need any further help?

Thanks Dwain for the help. Once I replaced the final 2 failed drives I was able to recreate the disk groups and then create the volumes and follow through the steps as shown above. What stumped me after doing all that was that I forgot to go into the Disk Management in Windows and initialize the new volumes and assign them a drive letter. Once I realized my error they appeared in my VMS and I'm back on track. Thanks again.

Carl, great to hear! Dwain, you're the man!