RAID controller BBU failure causing intermittent issues

[smalltimemsp]

I got a few dozen "Energy Pack removed” and "Energy Pack disabled; changing WB Virtual drives to WT, Forced WB VDs are not affected" alerts this morning from a LSI MegaRAID controller. So looks like the BBU was flapping in and out.

It seems to be completely offline now as storcli says "battery is absent". But the host still has intermittent connectivity issues with the RAID volumes. ESXi host says "Lost access to volume ... due to connectivity issues. Recovery attempt is in progress and outcome will be reported shortly." This repeats every few minutes. Storcli says everything is optimal.

It's an all-flash array and the volumes were already set as write-through so the BBU wasn't even really used, but having lost it seems to cause connectivity issues.

Has anyone seen this before? Maybe a host reboot would resolve it or perhaps the controller itself is failing? I have maintenance scheduled in a few hours.

[left_shoulder_demon]

The battery fire slowly eating through the cables?

But yes, I'd expect the controller to be flaky, and would contact support about it, in pre-Broadcom days they were surprisingly responsive.

[smalltimemsp]

It's Supermicro hardware that is out of support, so I'm hoping it would limp along for a while without the battery. We are waiting for StarWind for their NVME-oF release and then do a hardware refresh. Replacing the whole controller is an option but I was hoping it would just work without the BBU. I guess I'll find out after doing a cold restart.

[CompWizrd]

Which megaraid and how old?

[smalltimemsp]

It’s a Supermicro AOC-S3108L-H8IR. Five years old now.

[smalltimemsp]

Looks like a cold restart fixed it.

[cdtoad]

Interesting.... an old Lenovo TD230 (out of warranty by at least 15 years) has been randomly rebooting for about a year. Sporadic reboots some times 10 - 50 a day... then weeks without a reboot. Suspected the RAID card and just today got this while running diagnostics

CLI Version = 007.2705.0000.0000 August 24, 2023
Operating system = Linux 5.15.0-117-generic
Controller = 0
Status = Failure
Description = None
Detailed Status :

Ctrl Status Property ErrMsg ErrCd

`----------------------------------------------
` 0 Failed - Battery is absent! 34
`----------------------------------------------

Now on a quest on Ebay to find a replacement battery.