Hi Everyone,
Here's some background:
We have 2x HP BL460c G7 blades in a C3000 Chassis, attached via 2x VirtualConnect modules to 6x HP P4500 G2 LeftHands, via iSCSI. There's a AD 2012 R2 Directory Service in place and the 2x Blades are running Server 2012 R2 Full and connected to the domain.
Both blades have had the failover clustering role installed on them as well.
I have installed the MPIO feature on both nodes and the HP MPIO DSM and enabled Multipath in the MPIO control panel. Multipathing works fine; all the paths show up to each Lefthand node via the 2x iSCSI NICs on each blade. The multipathing setup matches HP and Microosft's best practices guides online.
All HP Lefthands are running OS version 12.0 and are parth of a single Management Group, with a single cluster. Volumes have been created and assigned to each of the Blades.
All HP Blades are running the latest firmware for both the BIOS, FlexCards and Network Adapters, the C3000 OAs are at the latest version and the Virtual Connect Modules are running 4.41 (Latest).
Our Issue:
When I go to create a new failover cluster and run the validation check, I get exact errors from this Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2009/04/15/windows-2008-failover-cluster-validation-fails-on-validate-scsi-3-persistent-reservation.aspx.
The blog and HP's documentation says it supports SPC-3 on HP P4500 G2 Lefthands.
We have no idea what we are missing, apart from the fact that the Lefthand doesn't show up in the MPIO configuration window as an SPC-3 compliant device.
In the following Guide: http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA4-4517ENW.pdf, which refers to Fibre Channel, the P4000 Lefthand is actually listed as an SPC-3 compliant Device, but they would be due to having a HP HBA connecting via FibreChannel to the Lefthand P4000 storage, whereas iSCSI is via the Microsoft iSCSI initiator, which does not have drivers from HP, because it's a Microsoft software device and the only 'drivers' required is the DSM, which is not a driver at all.
Normally we put ESXi in front of Lefthands, but we are doing Hyper-V this time with Windows Server 2012 R2 nodes and this is the first time we have seen this error. I have done Hyper-V 2008 R2 with a HP P2000 G3 and not seen these issues, although that was SAS, not iSCSI - so we have HP HBAs + P2000.
Anyone else come across this before?
We cannot proceed with building the cluster until this error is cleared. I am about to raise this with HP, but I believe this is more a Microsoft issue, as we are at the mercy of the Microsoft iSCSI initiator on this one. I am sure there is someone out there who has done a Failover Cluster with a HP P4000 iSCSI lefthand before... comeon! :P
Thanks,
Stefano