EVA 5000 adding mix capacity drives

[Joseph Salzer_4]

Uwe,

You are correct, if the EVA configuration does not have loop switches, it does require down time. However, it is not necessary if loop switches are used.

The last upgrade I did and the ones I have done in the past have all had loop switches. I have yet to work on an EVA without loop switches.

By the way, your English is very good.

[Orrin]

Hi,

I agree with the previous arguments.
However if you can get downtime, it would be great to stop host access to the EVA, before doing the additions.

Turn Auto addition off, turn sparing policy to none. Then make the additions, and return to normal sparing policy and auto addition.

This I believe will be the fastest method.

If you cannot get downtime. I'd be very cautious and add the shelves and then one disk at a time.

Best of Luck...

Regards,
Orrin.

[Uwe Zessin]

Well, I have upgraded two EVA-3000 'semi-online' (EVAs up, but hosts down) by doing the loops one-by-one. This was before the document I quoted was published, because the online update _was_ supported according to an older document (I have really checked this).

During the work I wished one could select a nice melody for the EMUs and not this beeeeep.

[Lyndon Handy]

We are adding 4 new enclosures to an existing initialized EVA 5000 in production for planned growth.
- VCS = 3.010
- Disk group = single group, mixed 146GB and 72GB drives
- 50% raw capacity free
- double sparing enabled
- automatic grouping disabled
- loop switches installed

Once the new enclosures have been added, we want to "rebalance" the existing physical disks across all enclosures for performance (spread the disks out vertically).
Then the longer term plan is to split the disk groups into two - 72GB disks in one group, 146GB disks in another group for best practices and for Busines Copy implemementation.

Q: Can we safely reposition the physical location of MOST OF the existing disks (ie. vertically) without data loss?
We have an outage window - we would like to shutdown the EVA gracefully, shuffle the drives in an optimal pattern (vertical alignment), then restart.
Is it safe to shuffle a large quantity all at once, or should be move only a few at a time, restart, test, shutdown, shuffle, etc.? I recall moving a drive or two before but not, say, a collection of 30 disks.

thanks.