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Old February 17th 04, 06:30 PM
Clark
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Default Dell EMC 4500 San and Windows Server 2003 Upgrade

We just upgraded to Windows Server 2003 from Windows 2000 Server and
our connectivity to our Dell EMC 4500 SAN completely broke (we could
no longer connect to the SAN). We have an Exchange 2000, SQL 2000,
and Windows 2000 file cluster accessing our SAN and fortunately we
only upgraded the file server cluster. When talking to Dell they said
they have never run into any issues with an upgrade like this to
Windows Server 2003 but I don't believe them. Dell's only
recommendation was to rebuild the servers from scratch.

Prior to the upgrade we researched the problem on Dell's and EMC's web
sites but never found any info concerning Windows Server 2003 support.
We did request and receive a support matrix from Dell stating that
the Dell/EMC SAN was supported on Windows 2003 however.

Apparently we needed to upgrade our 3.0 version of PowerPath to 3.5
PRIOR to the Windows 2003 upgrade. PowerPath 3.0 CANNOT be removed or
uninstalled from a server if you upgraded to Windows 2003 without
upgrading to PowerPath 3.5 first. I wish someone at Dell or EMC would
have posted this little known fact on their web-site somewhere.

After rebuilding the cluster from scratch with the new version of
PowerPath we still could not connect to the SAN. Dell now recommends
that we upgrade the firmware on all the HBA's and the 4500 and "see if
that works".

We haven't done that yet. Has anyone else run into this problem?