Upgrading disk firmware of EVA 4K

[rana786]

Hi All,

I need to upgrade disk firmware of my EVA 2C2D 4K. How can I do that? I also need to upgrade XCS. I am a little bit confused about disk firmware. Does it come with the XCS CD? What about the EMU firmware? During upgrade what else should I need to upgrade?

Do you have any document regarding this issue?
Please help?

Rana

[Peter Mattei]

Rana

All the required files should be on the CD.

Attached you find the XCS6 release note. It shows what else you have to do like CV and MPIO DSM upgrade etc. Read it thoroughly before you start!

If you feel uncomfortable I would ask HP to do the upgrade for you!

BTW: As soon as you are on XCS6 you can do the drive FW updates online (unless you have RAID0 VDISKS) Read more about in the Command View EVA 6 admin guide on hp.com

Cheers
Peter

[rana786]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your reply. Please reply to my following queries.

Does EVA4K support RAID 10? I mean RAID(0+1).
Please let me know if it is possible. I want to use RAID 10 for Exchange Database instead of RAID-5.

Thanks. - Rana

[Peter Mattei]

Rana

Yes the EVA uses RAID10
This will mirror and stripe a particular LUN over all available disks in a disk group and guarantee highest write performance (RAID0 would be even faster but I do not recommend using RAID0)
For reads RAID1 and RAID5 are equal in performance!

Cheers
Peter

[rana786]

Hi Peter,
I am confused. How can do RAID 10 in EVA. I don't have any idea. Could you please help me providing any docs for this? During VDISK creation I do not find any option for VRAID 10. Please help?

Rana

[Peter Mattei]

The main goals of the EVA are ease of use, performance and availability.

To achieve ease of use the VRAID levels have been designed. Each VRAID LUN is distributed over all available disks in a disk group.

In the case of VRAID1 always two disks build a married pair (D1 - M1 to D7 - M7 in the slide) and each LUN is then striped over these RAID1 pairs.
You do not have to decide which disks within a disk group have to be used it is always all of them!
The EVA actually uses RAID10.
Also see RAID definitions in WIKIPEDIA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

Also see the attached slide I drew in order to visualize what I explained above.
Note that this is a simplification of the actual sophisticated virtualization implementation of the EVA.

Cheers
Peter

[rana786]

Hi Peter,

Thanks, one last thing I need to know is it possible to increase assigned LUN size? Say I assigned a 100GB LUN to a windows 2003 host and after a few months I need to assign more 50GB to this LUN. I mean does EVA support increasing the LUN. If it is supported then how can I do that?

Rgds,
Rana

[Peter Mattei]

Yes, you can increas LUN size by just increasing the size in command view and click on save changes!

Now the OS also needs to support that!
On Windows 2k and 2k3 it is supported; you either need diskpart or HP Volume Growth to increase the drive letters size.

If you just increase the LUN Windows will show a larger disk with a larger unused/not partitioned space.

Cheers
Peter

[rana786]

Its ok.