Re: 57B5 (5913) card/pair failure/recovery - difficult to montor and troubleshoot

[DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Not necessarily all answers in order. :-)

These cards are getting quite old and we are seeing failures. If you 
recall these were the very FIRST cards with no batteries.

"Degraded" used to indicate battery failure primarily because that 
'turned off' the cache due to the fact that the cache is no longer 
backed up. However the loss of one card in any RAID card pair also turns 
off the cache and for the same reason. So "Degraded" today mostly does 
indicate either a card failure or a cable is loose.

The additional IPLs might have not reset the card if it was a hard fail 
that stuck the card in a loop for example. I would almost expect a 
PWRDWNSYS RESTART(*YES) IPL to NOT fix this. A full power down and 
restart from the HMC or certainly pushing of the white button on a 
single partition server would be more likely to break the loop and wake 
up the card. Potentially even powering down the slot in service tools 
and back up would fix this. I wouldn't be inclined to do this while the 
system was in production though.

Creating a new entry wouldn't be needed since the problem still exists 
in SAL and is not acknowledged, closed or cleared. It IS the same 
problem so just count the occurrences.

I would think the best defense is to check WRKPRB as there should be an 
open problem there.

        - Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 1/21/2019 3:42 PM, Steinmetz, Paul wrote:
> Early this morning, during an IPL, I had a 57B5 (5913) pair fail during an IPL.
> Because our monitoring software is not running during the IPL, I initially did not see the alert.
> Two additional IPLs - LPAR continued to run, but performance was EXTREMELY poor
> The initial "call home" PAL entry did not re-appear, only an increased count in the SAL entry, which I didn't see till later on.
>
> SAL entry
> Status  Date   	   Time       SRC        Resource     Count   PLID
> NEW     01/21/19  01:10:38   57B59076   DC05             3
>
> It was later discovered, with IBM hardware support,  via SST - 6. Display disk hardware status
> That the pair was "Performance degraded", which implied the disk controllers were running with ZERO cache.
>
> Performance degraded-
>    This state indicates the device is functional but  performance may be impacted due to other hardware  problems (such as a IOA cache problem).
>
> We identified the "suspect" card, which was NOT operational.
> Powered off the slot, powered slot back on.
> LPAR disk performance problem re-solved.
>
> I had similar failures on a different LPAR, different card pair over the years.
> Those failures were not during an IPL, but while LPAR was running.
> The difference in those two previous  failures was the card/slot was automatically reset by the code.
> Previously,
>
> This error was an L2 cache error and the cards needed to do a reset for data integrity reasons.
> The controllers went into a recovery, lasted 23 seconds, LPAR was "suspended" during this period.
> During the recovery, several applications failed, which then need a manual reset/recycle.
>
> 1) How does one better monitor for these types of card/pair failures?
> 2) Why did 2nd and 3rd IPL not reset the card?
> 3) Why did 2nd and 3rd IPL not "call home" and create a new PAL entry.
> 4) Anyone else from the group experience similar card/pair failures?
>
> Thank You
> _____
> Paul Steinmetz
> IBM i Systems Administrator
>
> Pencor Services, Inc.
> 462 Delaware Ave
> Palmerton Pa 18071
>
> 610-826-9117 work
> 610-826-9188 fax
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>
> psteinmetz@xxxxxxxxxx
> http://www.pencor.com/
>
>
>
>