Multipathing DS4243 shelves & merging stacks without downtime

rsasidharan — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:38:00 GMT

Hi All,

We have 2 DS4243 SATA shelves added to a clustered pair of v3240s as in diagram -1. These shelves are in independent stack now and have only one path from each controller. Our idea is to add dual paths from each controller to the shelves and also merge the stacks by installing shelf interconnect cables (diagram -2) so as to have only one single stack of DS4243 SATA shelves for the clustered pair.

Could someone please advise me if the following steps are the correct way to perform this without downtime -

We are trying to add dual paths to the shelves and merge the stacks as follows -

These are the steps we are planning to perform. However, we are not sure if these can be performed without downtime or disruptions.

1) Connect a new controller-to-shelf cable from controller1 (SAS HBA b port) to the bottom shelf IOM B ‘circle’ port

2) Remove controller-to-shelf cable from controller1 (SAS HBA c port) to the bottom shelf IOM A ‘squre’ port

3) Connect shelf-to-shelf cable from top Shelf IOM A ‘circle’ port to bottom Shelf IOM A ‘square’ port.

4) Connect a new controller-to-shelf cable from controller2 (SAS HBA b port) to the bottom shelf IOM A ‘circle’ port

5) Remove controller-to-shelf cable from controller2 (SAS HBA c port) to the bottom shelf IOM B ‘square’ port

6) Connect shelf-to-shelf cable from top Shelf IOM B circle’ port to bottom Shelf IOM B square port

Thanks,

Rethish Sasidharan

Re: Multipathing DS4243 shelves & merging stacks without downtime

rsasidharan — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 07:20:05 GMT

Just to update that we could successfully perform the above steps and enable multipath without any downtime or disruptions. However, we used 'd' port on the single quad-port SAS HBA instead of 'b' port following the SAS cabling rules.

Re: Multipathing DS4243 shelves & merging stacks without downtime

gavin_meadows — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 11:34:47 GMT

HI there,

I am looking at doing something similar here:

https://communities.netapp.com/message/116020#116020

it looks as though it should work, did you have any issues with your controllersd afterwards?

thanks

Gavin

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Multipathing DS4243 shelves & merging stacks without downtime

Re: Multipathing DS4243 shelves & merging stacks without downtime

Re: Multipathing DS4243 shelves & merging stacks without downtime