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Re: EVA6100 - "Number of Objects exceeded" failure on attempt to group replacement disk!

 
Cameron Todd
Regular Advisor

EVA6100 - "Number of Objects exceeded" failure on attempt to group replacement disk!

One drive failed in my company's EVA6100 (8 racks of FC and FATA drives) and a replacement was despatched by HP. The replacement drive is listed as ungrouped, as expected, however, when try to group this drive back into the same Disk Group that the failed one came from, get the error  "

Operation failed!   Maximum Number of Objects Exceeded.

"

 

As well, and probably because of it, the below warning shows that the Disk Group has become degraded due to the loss of that one drive because someone in the past had created a Virtual Disk with no RAID protection. Now the lost Virtual Disk is not a problem, but I am not game to selection "Start the Deletion Process" because this Disk Group has all the company's critical production systems on it (in other Virtual Disks, obviously) and I would need to be very reassured and confident that allowing this repair process to proceed will only remove that failed Virtual Disk and not affect any of the dozens of other real-life production volumes!

 

 

The following Vdisks and data replication groups have failed as a result of a hardware failure in this disk group. Failed Vdisks <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript"></script> Virtual Disks\testing Failed Data Replication Groups <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript"></script> No failed DR groups

  • Click the Continue with no changesbutton to continue operation without changing anything in your system at this time. In some cases, repairing the hardware will allow your system's virtualization features to automatically repair the Vdisk failure. Your disk group will display as degraded until you repair your hardware or return to this page to delete the failed Vdisks and DR groups shown above.

     

  • Click the Start deletion process button to delete the failed Vdisks and data replication groups shown above. If the hardware failure is minor, your disk group will be restored to normal operation, but without the failed objects above. If the hardware failure is severe, and your disk group cannot be restored, it will be deleted along with the objects listed above.
    If your Vdisk has a mirrorclone, it will be automatically detached.
5 REPLIES 5
Johan Guldmyr
Honored Contributor

Re: EVA6100 - "Number of Objects exceeded" failure on attempt to group replacement disk!

Hi, the deletion process will only delete the objects that are mentioned in that error message.
Cameron Todd
Regular Advisor

Re: EVA6100 - "Number of Objects exceeded" failure on attempt to group replacement disk!

My worry was the vague statement that "if Disk Group cannot be repaired then it will be deleted". Given our Disk Group, as per HP recommendations, contains all the installed disks in the EVA of that architecture and that all live production VDisks are also within this Disk Group (along with the inconsequential VDisk that was damaged/lost)  then there is a serious and far-ranging risk of major calamity if the worst case scenario eventuates upon invoking of the repair.

 

The other issue that I've found is that when ring HP Support (in India) the quality of experience and advice is extremely variable (I had a guy on the phone telling me once to pull another disk out of a RAID-5 array to see if the problem of a different failed disk would sort itself out! I had to argue with him that this was not a good idea and was so thankful I hadn't blithely followed his advice just because they are the 'experts') and so even if I had rung HP to get a ruling, then wouldn't have been confident of getting the accurate and safe/conservative solution for this critically important data storage network.

Johan Guldmyr
Honored Contributor

Re: EVA6100 - "Number of Objects exceeded" failure on attempt to group replacement disk!

I've seen this error many times when people have had vraid0 disks and a disk has broken.

It's never deleted anything other than the vdisk mentioned in the error message.

 

I can't give you more help than that, if you need more confirmation then I suppose buckle up, get backups (replication too?) and/or call HP and maybe you could get the case up to L2. Or at least you could have somebody go through the logs to make sure that there aren't any other broken disks in your array? Maybe that would make it feel safer? But still if they do find some disks that are bad, can you replace them?

Cameron Todd
Regular Advisor

Re: EVA6100 - "Number of Objects exceeded" failure on attempt to group replacement disk!

Yes, it was a RAID0 VDisk called 'Testing'  that collapsed when one physical failed on the EVA. I had confirmed this was the only physical disk that had failed. (pretty obvious since it was the only one with the red light on it across the whole of the cabinet!)

 

I bit the bullet and gave the ok to proceed and thankfully all was well. I was instantly given back an EVA that was not in degraded state and was then able to add the ungrouped replacement disk back in to the Disk Group from whence its predecessor came.  As well, the SEA process sent alert emails about a disk failing etc. but appears not for anything in production, just that failed volume of no consequence.

Uwe Zessin
Honored Contributor

Re: EVA6100 - "Number of Objects exceeded" failure on attempt to group replacement disk!

The EVA did keep the failed disk drive being assigned to the disk group to be able to potentially do a REVERT operation if the 'failed drive' did come back. The EVA-6100 is fully equiped with disk drives? Of course, adding another drive would have brought you over the licensed number of disk drives. Pretty obvious, no? ;-)

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