The Apple Xserve RAID now ships with 750GB drive modules, which increases the maximum capacity of each RAID unit now to 10.5TB. While that’s certainly great news, there’s one other part of the update that might not be as pleasing to fans of the fibre channel storage devices.
As part of the update, Apple also released Xserve RAID Admin Tools 1.5.1, which includes a new RAID Admin utility and the new firmware needed by current units to recognize the newer drive modules. The surprising change is in RAID Admin, which no longer has a LUN Masking configuration option.
I spoke with Apple Enterprise support and heard that LUN Masking is no longer a feature of the Xserve RAID, but that any LUN masks already present would be preserved even after using the new RAID Admin utility. However, I didn’t confirm if this is still the case once new firmware is applied.
The Apple support tech I spoke with couldn’t provide a reason for the change, but confirmed that the remaining option for assigning storage to hosts, zoning on the fibre channel switch, is what Apple now recommends.
Hi,
Thanks for the info, I can confirm the LUN mask is cleared by a firmware update. I have done so few days ago and this caused me some troubles... So keep in a safe place older version (say 1.3.3) of the RAID Admin utility. (and don't hesitate to ask the senior IT eng. to have a look at your problem, the older software version he uses is full of nice surprises)
Anyway, firmware update should be considered the ultimate move if anything does not work as expected, but I should have known.
BTW: Does anyone know how do you map a Xserve disk on Linux via FC qla2200?
wow, this is bad. I liked that feature.
The 1.5 version of the tool still works to let you change the LUN Masking. This was critical for me since I sliced an array and the only way to get that to work properly is with LUN Masking - unless you give up slicing and go with Xsan....maybe Apple was pushing that? Nah. :-/