No ACP on DS4243

[mheimberg]

Hi all

The DS4234-FAQ states:

"IS ACP A REQUIREMENT WITH DS4243?
ACP is highly recommended, but it is not required for support. This is because we recognize that legacy systems may not have an available Ethernet port. The current plan is to have a dedicated port on future platforms to enable use of ACP."

So if I am using DS4243 but not having the ports available for implementing ACP - what am I missing? What are the drawbacks? Something that will not work? etc....

THX

Markus

[danpancamo]

mheimberg@bnc.ch
Hi all
The DS4234-FAQ states:
"IS ACP A REQUIREMENT WITH DS4243?
ACP is highly recommended, but it is not required for support. This is because we recognize that legacy systems may not have an available Ethernet port. The current plan is to have a dedicated port on future platforms to enable use of ACP."
So if I am using DS4243 but not having the ports available for implementing ACP - what am I missing? What are the drawbacks? Something that will not work? etc....
THX
Markus

We have the ports, so I have the flip question...   What am I really gaining with ACP.   Does Ontap have some automagic code to now recover from a shelf issue? 

Sounds great since just last week we could have saved a trip to the DC to repower a shelf on an older system...   could have saved 4 hours of downtime!

[sraja2005]

From my understanding of ACP the control path is seperate from the data path, so things like monitoring etc don't go over the data path. That makes things more reliable. I have had at least a few cases on the FC loops where environmental bugs needed a disk shelf recycle.  Hopefully this will make that more resilient.

Suresh

[chriskranz]

ACP also takes care of multi-pathing and disk access, as well as general health monitoring. In theory if your system is under pressure, you should get a performance boost from using ACP, but I haven't seen any detailed facts around this. During a path issue or failure, ACP will help reduce any outage and quickly discover the best available path for your data.

Sort of like HA cabling on the disk shelf. Technically you don't need it, but there are some good benefits that you get from deploying it.

While you can set it up using a dedicated network interface, I haven't seen any discussions around using VLAN's ontop of an existing interface. The ACP can be configured through a switch, so in theory could the control interface from the filer be a shared physical interface, but traffic separated with a VLAN? (sorry to hijack the thread with a second question).

[aborzenkov]

Sounds great since just last week we could have saved a trip to the DC to repower a shelf on an older system...   could have saved 4 hours of downtime!

host:~ # rsh filer 'priv set -q diag; acpadmin'
Usage: acpadmin list_all
       acpadmin expander_reset <adapter_name>.<shelf_id>.<module_number>
       acpadmin expander_power_cycle <adapter_name>.<shelf_id>.<module_number>
       acpadmin post_data <adapter_name>.<shelf_id>.<module_number>
       acpadmin voltage_status <adapter_name>.<shelf_id>.<module_number>

Looks like there are some possibilities to remotely power-cycle shelf. Of course, they are on diag level ...

[mheimberg]

Thanks a lot to everyone contributing his/her experience.

Regards

Markus

[rkaramchedu1]

Proceed with caution on DS4243 and ACP

http://communities.netapp.com/message/24987#24987

"A new issue as of 7.3.2P3 (burt 401176)... By default the ACP communicates via SSL, if you have secureadmin (SSL) configured and or OpsMgr is set to communicate over SSL there could be a race condition between ACP and the HTTPS which will cause a panic (what happened in my case)

There are a couple workarounds to this burt, disable https or disable ACP or both.  Given that DS4243 engineering recommends the use of ACP, they suggest disabling https (options httpd.admin.ssl.enable  off) first to prevent the panic.  In the event of a recurrence, they are okay with disabling ACP (options acp.enabled off) too. "

http://now.netapp.com/NOW/cgi-bin/bol?Type=Detail&Display=393357
http://now.netapp.com/NOW/cgi-bin/bol?Type=Detail&Display=289315
http://now.netapp.com/NOW/cgi-bin/bol?Type=Detail&Display=403446