topic EVA - HPUX Compatibility in Disk Enclosures

EVA - HPUX Compatibility

Claudiu Schmidt — Mon, 17 Feb 2003 13:16:22 GMT

Hi,

we are planning to buy a new storage system for attaching it to a SAN with Windows and HPUX Systems. Has anyone implemented the EVA into an HPUX environment? if yes, does it work properly? did you do any testing for compatibility before attaching to the SAN?
Do you have any testing scenarious?
Any informations are welcome.

Re: EVA - HPUX Compatibility

Vincent Fleming — Mon, 17 Feb 2003 14:10:46 GMT

HP has certified the EVA with HP-UX, including MC/SG environments. This means we've actually fully tested EVA with HP-UX.

You will need SecurePath software (it's required with EVA).

If you're looking for someone who's done this already, well, it's a fairly new product (HP-UX cluster certified in late December 2002), so I'm sure deployments are still somewhat limited.

Good luck,

Vince

Re: EVA - HPUX Compatibility

Jose Valencia_1 — Thu, 20 Feb 2003 17:02:11 GMT

I'm just wonder if Vincent has read the documentation and specs for the EVA, acording with your website posted documents the EVA is not certified for HP MC/SG.

Re: EVA - HPUX Compatibility

Vincent Fleming — Fri, 21 Feb 2003 02:25:14 GMT

It was certified for MC/SG on Dec 20, 2002. My apologies, but the docs on the website must be out of date. I'm sure they'll update it soon.

Vince

Re: EVA - HPUX Compatibility

Donald Kok — Fri, 21 Feb 2003 14:37:59 GMT

Hi,

We ordered the EVA (as well as some HP-UX machines) and HP comes to implement this.

According to the salesreps AND the engineers this should be straightforward.

I 'll keep you informed if you want to.

Greetzz
Donald

Re: EVA - HPUX Compatibility

Donald Kok — Mon, 31 Mar 2003 12:41:07 GMT

Hi,

Prommissed to keep you informed.

EVA and hpux works without any problem.

Goodluck

Re: EVA - HPUX Compatibility

John Payne_2 — Mon, 31 Mar 2003 12:59:17 GMT

I was out of town when you origonally posted the message, sorry I missed it.

We purchased an EVA about a month before HPUX support came online. (The first try at supporting it. We got our EVA online, then Compaq pulled back...) Until about 3 days ago we had only HPUX attached to the SAN. We use the 2GB fibre cards for the HPUX machines. We have both HPUX 11.0 and 11i attached.

The SAN connection works as it should. If you have 2 HBA's, the failover provided by the EVA drivers works very, very well. (We tested HW failures from the card to the disk. The failover works very well.) We get a very fast read/write rates on the SAN. (We saw faster write rates to the SAN than to the internal disks.)

As far as testing, before we made the SAN production, we simulated HW failures all the way back (Pulled the fibre, failed a switch, etc.) while writing to the SAN disks.

If you want more info, let me know.

Hope it helps

John

Re: EVA - HPUX Compatibility

Claudiu Schmidt — Mon, 31 Mar 2003 13:09:31 GMT

Hi John, Hi Donald,

thanks for the answers. We just got a EVA for testing for 4 weeks from HP. Did you test a enclosure failure on the EVA? we had some different answers from HP about enclosure failure, some said it works, some it won't work , or will work only under some specific configuration. friday we tried one of this specific configurations, 12 disks in one diskgroup ,and 6 enclosures, and it worked fine. the 18 disk in diskgroup , crashed the system--> no answer from hp till now.
then the secure path hpux, why do you need one? if you don't need load balancing, it should work with lvm, but it does not. secure path does not work with other software products on the same server like power path from emc or autopath, and this you can not guarantee in a big san, where every server could see every storage.

claudiu

Re: EVA - HPUX Compatibility

Donald Kok — Mon, 31 Mar 2003 13:23:07 GMT

Hi Claudiu,
No we did not do a enclosure failure test. As a matter of facts, we did not test much at all. Our building burned out, and we went to a new location. From there we ordered a complete serverroom. The SAN happened to be EVA.

SecurePAth: we use it for loadbalancing and for redundancy. We don't want to have SPOF's. In the old building I worked with Autoraid which had no Securepath, and it was fine too. The problem with that was, that after an igniet install, all the path's were default. (All primary's to the first path).

Greetzz
Donald

Re: EVA - HPUX Compatibility

John Payne_2 — Mon, 31 Mar 2003 13:32:35 GMT

Secure Path is just the driver that the compaq people built for HPUX. Load Balancing is not for balancing the HBA's, it refers to the controller paths on the EVA. If you have a write going, and another write is requested, but the path is busy, it will take one of the other controller paths to the disks. (You may not gain much.) Use the command 'spmgr display' to look at things with secure path installed. Secure path just takes a path and makes it the master. (i.e. c0t8d0) Your lvm commands will work against the device file that is 'in charge'. When we present a lun to an HP machine, I use purely lvm commands to get the vg, lv, and fs to the OS... (We do not use MCSG or other EMC software, so I can't help you there.)

I think it is just a matter of what the EVA people will support. They support their drivers, if you do not have their drivers, their ability to support your configuration is 'fuzzy'. You can use the secure path drivers even if you only have 1 HBA, you are still supported by Compaq, and should be able to take to the device file by everything else.

(Typing spmgr will show you all the options. It's a nice tool to see what's happening to your luns...)

Hope it helps

John

Re: EVA - HPUX Compatibility

Nour E Belkeir — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 12:00:08 GMT

Hi claudiu,

I was wondering if you can email me the HP18 firmware for the VA7400!!

Thanks in advance

Nour Belkeir
nbelkeir@morehouse.edu