{"id":153,"date":"2009-11-30T10:03:55","date_gmt":"2009-11-30T18:03:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/?p=153"},"modified":"2009-12-02T08:23:33","modified_gmt":"2009-12-02T16:23:33","slug":"hands-on-with-a-dellequallogic-ps5000-iscsi-array","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/?p=153","title":{"rendered":"Hands-on with a Dell\/Equallogic PS5000E iSCSI array"},"content":{"rendered":"

I lost a drive in my iSCSI array, so I snapped a few pics as I replaced the drive.\u00a0 If you’ve never seen what using an array looks like, read on…<\/p>\n

\"PS5000E\"<\/a>

PS5000E<\/p><\/div>\n

(It’s the black 3U on top, the HP gizmo is a tape library…)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Equallogic PS5000E (recently Equallogic was bough by Dell) is a 3U iSCSI array.\u00a0 Mine has 2 controllers with 2GB of battery backed cache memory and 8 1TB SATA drives, expandable with 8 more (total of 16 1TB drives).\u00a0 With a hot spare and RAID overhead, 8TB of raw capacity translates into a little more than 5 TB usable of RAID-5.\u00a0 Each controller\u00a0 has 3 Gig NIC’s, and does load balancing across the NIC’s within the array (easy!).\u00a0 This is “just” an iSCSI array, it doesn’t do “filer’ functions like NFS or CIFS.<\/div>\n
\n
\"Now<\/a>

Now owned by Dell<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\"PS5000E<\/a>

PS5000E Rear<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Like most arrays, these come with a web based GUI.\u00a0 Mine looks like this.<\/div>\n
\"Equallogic<\/a>

PS5000 Main Menu<\/p><\/div>\n

I logged in the other day, and noticed these errors in the event log.\u00a0 (Look at the gray, and read from the bottom up.)\u00a0 Drive 4 had failed.\u00a0 Good thing I had a dedicated hot spare assigned (drive 7), the array automatically off-lined the failed drive, and used the hot spare.\u00a0 No one noticed anything.\u00a0 I tried reseating the failed drive, but that didn’t help.<\/div>\n
\"iscsi_errors\"<\/a><\/div>\n
Replacing the drive is easy.\u00a0 Dell overnights you the replacement.\u00a0 It’s nicely packed, complete with instructions and return label.<\/div>\n
\"ps5000_replacement_drive\"<\/a><\/div>\n
This is just a regular old SATA drive, in a fancy Equallogic drive sled.\u00a0 The sled is a pretty fancy one, with an extra circuit board at the rear of the drive.\u00a0 Dell wants $2500 each for these drives (WTF!?!)\u00a0 I’ve seen 250 GB drives in these sleds on eBay for less than $50.\u00a0 You could buy one of those, and then put the correct 1TB drive in it for a couple of hundred dollars.\u00a0 Of course, that would void your warranty \ud83d\ude42<\/div>\n
\n
\"Drive<\/a>

Drive in the fancy sled<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Take the old drive out.\u00a0 You don’t have to tell the array you’re going to do this with the GUI first, just yank it out, the array figures it out<\/div>\n
\"Remove<\/a>

Remove the drive<\/p><\/div>\n

Stick the replacement in.\u00a0 That’s all there is to it.<\/div>\n
\"ps5000_replace_drive\"<\/a><\/div>\n
Once the new drive was inserted, the array automatically started using it, and declared it to be the new hot spare.\u00a0 These events were now displayed:<\/div>\n
\"iscsi_fixed\"<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I lost a drive in my iSCSI array, so I snapped a few pics as I replaced the drive.\u00a0 If you’ve never seen what using an array looks like, read on… (It’s the black 3U on top, the HP gizmo… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-content"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":41,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":157,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions\/157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}