HBA card troubleshooting

HBA card troubleshooting 

HBA card is configuration is very important and if you can’t configure HBA card, then system won’t see your storage and you will have big issues.

Make sure HBA card instered properly, I had this problem with my Solaris box and after I have insereted the card properly, system detected the HBA card. Once it’s detected you can see it in BIOS.

Another important this is HBA card driver. If you don’t have proper driver, then it work and it’s doing all the communication between the SAN switches via the FC-SW Fibre Channel protocol and SAN storage arrays.

You need to keep the firmware up to date and upgrade to the latest version of firmware from the vendor support matrix site

If your system is hang or freeze during startup, it may caused by the device conflict (new device that recently installed). Remove the HBA card and reboot the system, if the problem is resolved, check the HBA card that you newly installed as it could be a faulty HBA card. If the problem still persists, try the HBA card in another machine. If the HBA card is work there, this is usually a conflict between the system and the HBA card. Contact the vendor to do the appropriate check on the HBA card by using card utility tool before you re-install the HBA card.

A problem HBA card may cause the link up and down. The healthy HBA card should never disconnect its light from the SAN switch for any reason unless the server is in the process of rebooting. For the server with new HBA card, the most common problem often either SAN switch port related or Fibre Channel cable related. To resolve the cable problem is easy, just replace another cable. If it is happen on the SAN switch level, check the GBIC / port, replace the GBIC if is it detected as faulty. Normally if the GBIC is unhealthy, the lights will go up and down or there is no signal from the GBIC at all.

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