[SOLVED] PowerVault MD3620i - Power off

[DavidGarside]

Hellloooo,

Apologies if this isn't the correct forum.

We currently use a Dell PowerVault MD3620i as a disk array for our Proxmox environment and we've recently purchased some more disks to expand the storage capacity. The Disk array is setup to use a virtual disk and is using Raid 6

As part of some weekend maintenance work we was planning on shutting everything off in our server room including the PowerVault Disk array. Powered all of the other servers off and we got to the disk array, myself and my manager were under the impression we could disconnect the network cable and just power off the Disk array but after disconnecting the network cable we noticed that the "Activity" & "Status" lights on the drives themselves continued flashing green.

The status light we expected to continue flashing but we was a little bit worried as to why the "Activity" light was still flashing as nothing else is communicating to the disk array, we left the disk array for 45 minutes and went back to it and the light was still flashing.

1 - Does anyone know why the Activity light would still be flashing and are we okay to shut the disk array down whilst the lights flash?
2 - Are we okay to shutdown the disk array once the network card has been disconnected?

We've contacted our Dell account manager and his reply was "We're unable to tell you that because you don't have support on the machine"

Does anyone know the answer to the two questions above? If you need anything else please let me know.

 

[kanewolf]

Hellloooo,

Apologies if this isn't the correct forum.

We currently use a Dell PowerVault MD3620i as a disk array for our Proxmox environment and we've recently purchased some more disks to expand the storage capacity. The Disk array is setup to use a virtual disk and is using Raid 6

As part of some weekend maintenance work we was planning on shutting everything off in our server room including the PowerVault Disk array. Powered all of the other servers off and we got to the disk array, myself and my manager were under the impression we could disconnect the network cable and just power off the Disk array but after disconnecting the network cable we noticed that the "Activity" & "Status" lights on the drives themselves continued flashing green.

The status light we expected to continue flashing but we was a little bit worried as to why the "Activity" light was still flashing as nothing else is communicating to the disk array, we left the disk array for 45 minutes and went back to it and the light was still flashing.

1 - Does anyone know why the Activity light would still be flashing and are we okay to shut the disk array down whilst the lights flash?
2 - Are we okay to shutdown the disk array once the network card has been disconnected?

We've contacted our Dell account manager and his reply was "We're unable to tell you that because you don't have support on the machine"

Does anyone know the answer to the two questions above? If you need anything else please let me know.

I don't see anything in the Owner's Manual -- https://downloads.dell.com/manuals/common/powervault-md3600i_owner's manual_en-us.pdf that says any special process is required to shutdown the array. (I searched "power" and "shutdown" ) ...
I would shutdown ALL servers with mounted volumes, then power down the storage array.
If you have a server running the management software, you can double check that there is no shutdown option.