Environment
Novell NetWare 6.5 Support Pack 5
Situation
Using pool snapshots and backing up those snapshots the pool
would deactivate and go into
an "unknown". Under normal conditions you should never
see the pool enter into a state of
unknown.
Resolution
Updated firmware and replaced HBA's with newer Active/Active
cards. It appeared that during
a period of high I/O the card's could go into a "BUSY"
state. Unfortunately if the driver does not
see any activity from the card it would look for alternate
paths. To preserve the integrity of data
if a viable path was not selected the driver would immediately
deactivate the device. Updated
drivers (Qlogic) also assisted in recovering from a BUSY
state.