This is a problem that’s been on my mind for some time; can the Drobo Dashboard see more than one device at the same time? Well, it turns out the answer is yes.
At first my thought was that it wasn’t possible for the Drobo Dashboard to manage more than one device. Currently I have a Drobo connected into a DroboShare and a shiny new DroboPro, which is serving iSCSI LUNs to my ESX server. I’ve not been able to get Drobo Dashboard on my main Windows 7 PC to work correctly. It seems to have issues seeing the DroboShare. I’ve checked all the obvious stuff (like firewalls) but still can’t get it to work. Anyway, I was testing connectivity from my MacBook to the DroboPro using USB and to my surprise, both the DroboShare (called Drobo1) and my DroboPro (called DroboNAS2) both appeared in the GUI. Have a look at the attached graphic. You can see the Drobos listed at the top of the screen; this can be used to toggle between a display of both devices.
Now this is the Mac version of the Dashboard. I can’t vouch for the Windows version as mine clearly doesn’t work correctly, however I imagine it works the same way. So the answer to the question; “Can Drobo Dashboard manage Multiple Drobos?” is clearly – Yes.
Oh, one other thing worthy of note; I can confirm that the DroboPro definitely will *not* let me connect to the USB port while it is serving iSCSI LUNs through IP. That’s a real shame, as I can’t manage the device without an outage. Bit of a showstopper, I think.
