Repurposing NetApp H610s

[Ank]

Hi, I am also running into issues writing to any of the 12 NVME drives in a H610s. The symptom is that the operating system can read from the drives but not write to them. So can't create VMFS datastores, for example. Could it be that the disk controller is refusing writes due to un-flushed cache or something like that? I checked all the BIOS settings, there does not seem to be a menu item or way to access the disk controller. I have tried Ubuntu, it sees the NVME drives but can't modify the partition table. ESXi gives an error "failed to create VMFS datastore, cannot change the host configuration". Any help or ideas appreciated - thanks!

[elementx]

There's no need to guess when the system is under your control.

1) Can you create a new (some minimal size, such as 10GB) disk and login to that target from ESXi? You cannot, then SolidFire events should have some sort of error in Events/Logs. `Get-SFEvents` in PowerShell or you can even forward SolidFire cluster syslog to some Linux box for very verbose logs. If NVRAM (which is the read/write cache on SF nodes, NVDIMM on H610-S) is damaged I don't think that would not prominently appear in SolidFire UI as a Critical-level error. You may even see errors in IPMI Web UI since that's a h/w problem, but SolidFire captures h/w errors and surfaces those in its Events and Alerts, so looking directly in IPM probably won't help you discover anything new.

2) If you can, can ESXi format it, and if not, what error does it report (presumably can't access/write?) If ESXi can login but not write, then just focus on SolidFire, assuming nothing changed on the network since everything worked OK. But I'm not convinced this is about being unable to write to target.

> "ESXi gives an error "failed to create VMFS datastore, cannot change the host configuration".

There are several possible reasons for this. It does not say the disk is read-only.

https://community.broadcom.com/vmware-cloud-foundation/discussion/failed-to-create-vmfs-datastore-cannot-change-the-host-configuration

If you can't solve it with ESXI, maybe access a new volume from a Linux VM connected to iSCSI network just to see if it can write (or reports some easier to understand error).

[Ank]

Hi, thanks for your reply. I should have been clearer. I want to install ESXi on the H610s, not use the H610s as a storage node. So the OS running on the H610s will be ESXi (homelab). I tried many options including nvme-cli, Samsung DC tools, etc, but could not write to or erase the drives. On a second H610s, I let the Netapp firmware boot, then chose to factory reset the node. I let that process complete then booted the system from ESXi USB install stick. I was able, on this system, to install ESXi to a second USB stick (leaving the internal SATA flash drive intact). The factory reset seems to have done the trick and removed the drive encryption that seemed to be present on the other system. So I can make VMFS filesystems on the NVME drives now.

[Ank]

I am exploring the idea that the Netapp might be using NVME drive encryption. I will look into using nvme-cli to try to remove the drive encryption and make the drive writeable.