Dell MD3420 Storage Not Showing Up in Hyper-V After Power Outage
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TechVoyager42
Hey everyone! I set up a Hyper-V cluster a couple of years ago and it was working flawlessly until we experienced a power outage due to a UPS failure. After switching everything to a regular power supply, I turned on my Dell MD3420 storage and two Hyper-V hosts, but I've lost the iSCSI connection to the storage. While I can access the PowerVault Modular Manager on one of the hosts and all health checks appear normal, I can't map the iSCSI SAS interfaces. When I add the controller IP to the iSCSI initiator and click Quick Connect, it fails. Strangely, the initiator defaults to port 3260, yet a port scan only shows port 23 open, which I enabled for troubleshooting. The controllers are pingable from the hosts, but despite deleting and re-adding the mappings and checking the MPIO paths on the hosts, I'm stuck. Could a factory reset on the controllers resolve this? Any thoughts? Thanks in advance!
Answers
Before you rush into a factory reset, be cautious! That would erase your RAID configuration and could lead to a bigger recovery issue. Remember, the MD3420 connects directly via external SAS cables to the server’s HBA, not over Ethernet using iSCSI. If you mistakenly added the controller’s IP to the iSCSI initiator in Windows, that’s why it failed and port 3260 is closed. A likely cause for your current trouble is that the storage controllers take a while to boot up after a power loss. Try powering off everything, restart the storage alone, and wait about 5 minutes until the controller lights are solid green. After that, turn on the Hyper-V hosts. If everything's wired correctly, you should see the disks without messing with the iSCSI settings.
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I had a similar issue and found a solution. Here's what I did: unplug all SAS cables, disable the HBAs and Microsoft iSCSI initiator in Device Manager, delete mappings in the PowerVault Manager, reboot the hosts, re-enable the HBAs, reconnect the SAS cables, and then recreate the mappings in PowerVault Manager. After that, rescan the disks in Disk Management and it worked perfectly! Give it a shot.
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First, double-check the time settings on both the storage and the hosts to ensure they're synchronized. Sometimes, time discrepancies can cause connectivity issues. You mentioned you didn't use NTP, but if you synchronized the time after the power outage, that could help!
TechVoyager42: I manually synced the time right after the power came back. I hope that’s enough!
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TechVoyager42: I did shut everything down, restarted the storage, and waited a while, but no luck. I’m confused because I thought we connect via Ethernet first to set up the targets?
SASFixer76: It sounds like you might be mixing things up. Make sure you’re targeting the correct data ports instead of the management IP. Double-check your connections!