windows format of eva 5000 lun slow

[Trevor Parfitt]

I am attaching a windows 2003 server to my eva 5000 and while I have had no problems setting up securepath and presenting luns.
When I came to format the disks under disk management it took a long time.
How long should it take to format a 50GB Lun?
Does anyone have any tips for lun setup on the EVA or possible tuning of the fc card on windows.

thanks

Trev

[Ruslan]

Hi Trevor!

It sounds like that initialization of Vdisk not complete... What type of Vraid do you use, how much drivers in Disk group where your Vdisk reside, what protection level is being use? All of this impact to initialization process. View status of your Vdisk in Command View EVA. What about your SAN design and FC HBA model?

[Trevor Parfitt]

I am using raid 5 , the vdisk had finished initialising . 2 FC2214 hba's are configured using Securepath. The servers and EVA attach to 2 storageworks switches.There are 53 72gb disks in the disk group using double protection.

[Stephan.]

It should not longer need then a minute.

Usually you will do a rescan, choose a basic disk, write the windows signature, partition the LUN and format it. Don't forget to check "Quickformat" otherwise it will need several minutes.

On the EVA side, it is create Disk, Enter a Name, choose Diskgroup, Enter VRAID level, enter Size, choose the Host to present to - finished.

Out of the head i have no idea about some possible tuning tips.

hth

[Ruslan]

Initiallization process take in background, not visiable to user and there is write overhead in Vraid-5 impacting to perfomance. How long ago you configure your disk group? Is it Default Disk Group? I think you don't need worry about long formating process... Be patient :) In future it really take a minutes

[Uwe Zessin]

For some environments it looks like a good idea to do a manual alignment of the partition - doesn't hurt if it's always done:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=PSD_OI040301_CW02

[Herr Ing. RUEHRNESSEL]

Hi Trevor,

did you get a solution to your formatting problem yet?

I have the same problem. It takes an awfull long time to format a 200GB Vraid5 Volume. It's not a matter of minutes - it is a matter of hours. If i use "Quickformat" it finishes within minutes.

I do not have performance problems during runtime - it is just the formatting process that is so slow.

Regards
Manfred

[Trevor Parfitt]

Hi Manfred,

I actually got HP to run a comparable test in their labs.They found it took 2hr 32min to format 150GB. No answer was given as to why it takes so long but it does appear to be normal. I would also use diskpart to correctly align the partition ( see link above) as this was also suggested by the HP engineer.
An interesting point I found in testing. If you create a 1GB LUN to NT .Format is , then extend the LUN on the EVA.When you extend the partition on NT it does it instantly.

[Herr Ing. RUEHRNESSEL]

Thank you!

It actually took me 1.5 hours to format a 100GB Volume. And that time is almost constant, if i repeat the format-operation a second or third time.

I worry about Windows 2003 Automatic Server Recovery issues, if an EVA System is involved on the Recovery Site. The Windows 2003 ASR process tries to format all visible volumes attached to Smart Array controller and presented via EVA via asr_fmt.exe. I have no option to interfere with this operation - i can just sit and wait almost a day until my EVA disks are formated before further disaster revovery operations can continue.

Anyway, I opened a Support Call to get a proper solution.

Regards
Manfred

[Trevor Parfitt]

Hi Manfred

If you manage to get a decent answer from HP I would really like to know it.

regards

Trevor