Appliance is offline and unusable

Symptom

The Maintenance console indicates that an appliance is offline and unusable because of incomplete data.

Neither appliance in the appliance cluster is active. Constraints for data integrity prevent the automatic activation of the appliance.

Cause

An appliance in an Offline / Unusable (incomplete data) state experienced an outage while its data was being synchronized or it encountered a disk write error. The appliance cannot be activated in this state.

Action
  1. Reconnect the offline/unusable appliance with the other appliance in the cluster.
  2. The other appliance likely has the most up-to-date data.
  3. Reestablishing a connection between the appliances will allow data synchronization to complete.
  4. Bring the up-to-date appliance enclosure back online.
  5. Use the View details command in the up-to-date appliance Maintenance console to locate its location (enclosure and appliance bay).
  6. If its enclosure is offline, powering it on could correct the problem.
  7. If the enclosure cannot be brought back online, move the up-to-date appliance to an operational enclosure.
  8. Whenever possible, install clustered appliances in different enclosures to improve fault protection.
  9. Ensure that all such cables are connected properly.
  10. Restore from backup.
  11. If the up-to-date appliance is in an irrecoverable state, use a backup copy of the appliance data to restore operation:
    1. Factory reset or reimage both appliances.
    2. Restore one appliance from a recent compatible backup file.
    3. Allow the other (or another) appliance to join into a high availability cluster with the restored appliance.
  12. If a replacement appliance is required, you can add it later to restore high availability.