Dual FlexFlash - Secondary Unhealthy state

[pettergjersvold]

Hello,

I just bought 2x C220 M3 USC servers and both comes with 2x flash cards for FlexFlash. The issue I have on both is that the secondary card on both servers comes up as unhealthy state.

I tried to replace one of them with a new flash card but even that comes up as unhealthy. I'm new to this setup so I have a feeling that I'm missing something. All flash cards are Cisco 16GB.

On one of the servers I did a firmware update but that did not help either. The card doesn't even show up on the boot menu (but I guess its because the Virtual Partition is broken).

Any tips on what might be causing this issue?

Thanks 

[Walter Dey]

The FlexFlash controller does not support RAID-1 sync (mirror rebuild). If the SD cards are in a degraded
RAID state, or if any metadata errors are reported by the controller, you must run the FlexFlash scrub
policy to pair the cards for RAID. For more information about the FlexFlash scrub policy, see Scrub
Policy, on page 406. The following conditions might result in degraded RAID or metadata errors:

◦Inserting a new or used SD card in one slot, when the server already has an SD card populated in
the second slot.

◦Inserting two SD cards from different servers.

• The server firmware version must be at 2.2(1a) or higher.
Cisco UCS Manager GUI Configuration Guide, Release 2.2
 

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/sw/gui/config/guide/2-2/b_UCSM_GUI_Configuration_Guide_2_2.pdf

p. 404 ff

[pettergjersvold]

Great info, thanks.

I'll give it a try tomorrow morning.

[Keny Perez]

Unfortunately the scrub policy scenario ONLY applies if these servers are integrated with UCSM, if that is not the case and the servers are standalone, then you might want to try to run the SCU and run a diagnostic, to see if there is a hardware failure logged by the tool and if nothing is found to be damaged, try a synchronization as shown in the link below, page 29:

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/unified-computing/whitepaper_C11-718938.pdf

Make sure that both cards are running same firmware version too to avoid a fw mismatch causing a false error.

If you do not see the cards during the boot process, it is very likely that the partitions are not enabled, as shown in the same doc above, page 5.

Last thing you may try is to reseat the Riser Card where the SD cards are installed, if that does not work, you might want to open a TAC case to take a deeper look and see if something perhaps needs replacement or if you, instead, need to modify something in the configuration.

-Note:  I once saw a case where the SD cards were slightly different in size ( a few MB) and that was causing a mismatch, so you might want to try different card combination between the 4 you have to see if that is the issue as well.

HTH,

-Kenny