Unexporting a Virtual Volume part of a Volume Set

[papo]

Hello!
Anybody encountered that issue when unexporting a Virtual Volume that is part of a Volume Set will unexport the whole Volume Set? Well, that happened to us and without any warning, all our datastores got detached from our vSphere cluster...
Is this a normal behaviour or is it a bug? We easily reproduced the problem this morning and I can confirm that we really had no warning that the volume was still part of a Volume Set nor that the whole Volume Set would be unexported.
We are waiting for an answer from HP.

[Christian]

The way to do it is to edit the volume set and remove it from Assigned.
Because if you remove it on the host you will remove all the volumes since the Volume Set is exported to that host / Host Set.

And yes it has happen here too

[Richard Siemers]

If your VLUN template (export) is for a "Volume set", then you do not want to delete that template, and instead edit the volume set members.

I have added/removed volume set members to an already exported volume set before, no suprises.

[r.borgmaster]

I belive very many admins learn about this the hard way. I've done, my admin colleagues have done it, the ppl who installed our array have seen dozens of customers do it.

While I know that the proper way to remove a volume that was exported as part of set, is to remove it from set, I do concider this a bug. For what reason can you possibly interpret the gesture of right-click -> unexport on a single line as that the admin actually want to remove all volumes and not a single one...

[Richard Siemers]

For what reason can you possibly interpret the gesture of right-click -> unexport on a single line as that the admin actually want to remove all volumes and not a single one...

I played with it briefly tonight and there is a window that pops up after I clicked unexport that showed me a list of templates and all the VLUNs that will be removed with it, asking for confirmation. Did that not happen in your testing? Perhaps its specific to the area of the IMC you did this in, do you recall? My test was done from Hosts --> click host in list, in the middle pane switch to Virtual Volumes, and right click, unexport from here.

Thanks

[papo]

We did the test again and we did in fact get the warning. We had previously missed that first line that refers to the template wich is in fact the volume set.
HP said that this should be fixed in the next version of the console by preventing us from unexporting a virtual volume that is still part of a volume set.

[Richard Siemers]

Good info, thanks for the update.

I *believe* the option to un-export is fairly new, I am not sure when they snuck that in. The process we learned to accomplish this task was to go to the host(s) and delete the VLUN template(s). Un-export makes more sense to me.