DS14MK4 Shelf Connection Breaks FAS 3170

[jjensen90]

I have a FAS 3170 HA Pair that has two loops containing 5 DS14MK2 shelves and runs perfectly fine. I attempted to connect two more additional loops to the 4 port card added to the FAS. The shelves being added are all DS14MK4. There will be 7 shelves per new loop. At first some of the shelves were being see and some where not. A few of the shelves would come up with "?" as the shelf ID. All of a sudden my controllers will only boot to the loader prompt. I have tried rebooting, booting primary, booting secondary, zeroing. I am out of ideas now. Any help would be wonderful. Thank you.

[aborzenkov]

Max supported number is 6 shelves per loop. I do not know if exceeding it can cause problems.

Start with single shelf per loop and add shelves one by one making sure configuration is stable each time. Unfortunately due to FC-AL architecture any single component can cause instability and the only way to find it is replacement.

[jjensen90]

I tried starting over and adding just one shelf. It wasn't being recognized by the controllers. So, I tried adding three shelves at first and the third shelf was recognized, but two of the disks weren't seen. There were a few disks that were seen but they came from a shelf with a "?" for its ID. So, I was missing two shelves and then a bunch of errors started hitting the screen. A bunch of different errors came across like "new drive inserted in bay 1c.56" and "something about the firmware". Finally it started saying "no path found to disk" and then I couldn't see any of the new shelves added. Not sure what’s going on here.

 @aborzenkov

[rwelshman]

Are you able to physically check the disk shelves and make sure the shelves have unique IDs and the modules are set to the same speeds in the loop?

[jjensen90]

All of the shelves have different IDs. The speed was set to 4G on all 3 shelves. I tried setting it to 2G to see if it would have any change. There seems to be a little change. I can see all of 3 now and all of shelf 2 except 3 drives, but still cannot see any of shelf 1. @rwelshman

[rwelshman]

Maybe you have already done this, but I would ensure the shelves were disconnected from both filers, then confirm shelf IDs and set all speeds to 2 or 4 (have you verifed the adpater you are using is capable of 4?), then power cycle the shelves. After connect them to each other and then connect them to the controllers one link at a time, verifying that the controller can see the shelves after each individual connection. If you can't see all the disks on the first connection to the filer, you should look at cable connections / replace cables / reseat modules before attempting to add any further connections to the controllers.