EVA 5000 Failure

[Manoj_28]

Hi,

We have an EVA500 running VCS 3.014 failed.
Today a single disk failure brought the entire system down. Still the system is not and HP services working on this. Anybody have similar experiance. Both the controllers are saying configuration missing.

Regards
Manoj

[David Bodey]

Hi Manoj,

I have a EVA 3000 which we upgraded to VCS V3.014 last July. Two weeks ago we too had a faulty disk drive which possibly caused the EVA to go 'offline'. By the time I got into Command View EVA, the storage system was reported as Uninitialised. All I could see was a Hardware tree with the two controllers with red crosses. Drilling down to the controllers, they were both in the red. I noticed on the "Device Ports" tab that the both ports for each controller were in a Operational State of "failed", with a button to "Enable"/ I did the enable on all ports on both controllers and the storage came back as usual, with 1 drive dropped out of the disk groups and another marked as bad.

HP were unable to come up with an actual cause and have asked me to keep an eye on the HSV logs for issues with "loops 1A and 1B for any irrational behaviour".

Would be very interested to hear how you go Manoj as I am very concerned about the current reliability of the EVA.

[Manoj_28]

Hi All,

It was sad to say that Hp services couldnt bring our EVA5000 up and running. Still the EVA is down and HP report says metatdata is lost and they cant recover the data or the disk structure.

Only option is to re-initialise the system.

Still the system is down

Regards
manoj

[Alzhy]

Manoj,

We have the exact same problems some time ago and another weird one just a week ago which literally took HP 24+ plus to recover. We are also at 3.014. HP has enabled ILF Logging in the hope to capture info for them to fix their EVA code/firmware/os..

Say.. are your EVA's also connected to HP-U systems or a mix? Are you running Business Copy as well?

Due to this glaring fact that the "Enterprise" Virtual Array is not a perfect single array solution, and due to the fact that Business COPy cannot mirror accross EVA's - we are thinking of employing VxVM to mirror accross 2 EVA's so in such a catastrophic event -- we can non-disruptively survive/failover to the surving EVA(s)... hopefully the chances of having 2 EVA 5K's fail at the same time is unlikely...

[David Bodey]

The latest response I have had from HP is "... to upgrade to VCS3.020 and also update the drive firmware using the 3.021 superfile". The disk firmware to go to HP05 (currently on HP03).

[Manoj_28]

Dear All,

hp engineering says to upgrade VCS 3020 AND drive firm firware to 3021.

hp sying "similar" problems are resolved in the abovesaid versions.Its important that hp is still not clear about the problem. The word "similar" indicates that.

So still our EVA is down and we are waiting fo the report from hp engineering.

HP has enabled ILF Logging and captured info for them.

Our EVA was connected only to couple of NAS clusters HP 4000s and some of other windows hosts.

Regards
Manoj

[Alzhy]

I doubt at all if VCS 3.020 will fix things.. The fix will come from us sites that have been enabled with ILF logging and hopefully a recurrence will happen. We've been on it for about 1 week now. They've so far upgraded disk firmware as some of you have.

I pose again my question to the gentlemen on this thread.. Are your EVAs connected to HP-UX environments solely? Are you running SecurePath 3.0D? Intense Business Copy jobs?

Just trying to get some common denominator here..

[Alzhy]

Manoj,

I did not read your reply in its entirety.. so youe EVAs are both UNIX and Windoze connected.

So with ILF logging enabled.. did your environment already have a recurrence of the failure? It will be very valuable for HP to come up with a fix for us sites that have been plagued with EVA problems...

[Ruth Lutes]

Manoj,

I am very concerned about the situation you describe. Please provide your case details so I can understand why your EVA has not been recovered. I will contact you about your case number.

Ruth Lutes
EVA Quality & Customer Satisfaction

[David Bodey]

For the record, in my case the EVA3000 is in Australia and used to server only two OpenVMS servers. I am not using Business Copy.