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Re: EVA 5000/3000 + VCS 4.01

 
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Alzhy
Honored Contributor

EVA 5000/3000 + VCS 4.01

My FE confrims my older EVA 5K's should be able to go to VCS 4.01 but it needs to pass 3.028 first. Here's VCS 4.01 info:

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/sanworks/softwaredrivers/vcs/index.html

VCS 4.01 is supposed to make older EVAs active/active arrays - hence standard multipathing solutions both native and 3rd party (Veritas DMP) should now be possible.

Has anyone actually gone through with the upgrade? Can you pelase share your experiences/thoughts on the matter.

I am particularly interested if an upgraded EVA5K runing VCS 4.01 is "fully" supported under VxVM 3.5 on 11.11 or in VxVM 4.1 in 11.23. There is already full VxVM support for the newer active/active EVA 4/6/8K and there is even an ASL (Array Support Library) but documentation on the ASL do not mention EVA5K runinf VCS 4.01.

Thank you.
Hakuna Matata.
8 REPLIES 8
SAKET_5
Honored Contributor

Re: EVA 5000/3000 + VCS 4.01

Hi Nelson,

I was at the HP SLC (Storage Leadership Council) last week and had plenty of opportunities to hear to other customers feedback on EVAs upgrades, etc. Points of major pain that I heard were as follows:
- as you mention VCS4 enables the active/active role of the HSV110 controllers (to be technically accurate - it is really enabling both controllers to proxy I/Os for LUNs that are not even owned by them)- what this also means is Secure Path will not be supported. So, for servers using Secure Path - you will need to go through the process where you configure the native MPIO equivalent depending on the OS in question. This on Solaris seemed to have caused some grief to a few customers around - especially with uninstalling Secure Path and messing up with LUN mapping at the filesystem level.

I am currently in the planning phase for doing this upgrade myself on atleast 3 EVA5Ks...so stay tuned and I will be happy to provide more info as they come to me.

Regards,
Saket.
Vincent Fleming
Honored Contributor

Re: EVA 5000/3000 + VCS 4.01

What I hear is that VCS4.01 makes the EVA5000 idential to an EVA8000 in function on the FC fabric.

Don't forget that you MUST backup your data and restore it after a 4.01 upgrade. It's different enough that your data will be destroyed during the upgrade. All configuration data is lost.

So SAKET, don't worry about messing up your volume management - you'll have to restore the data anyway. Here's your chance to re-arrange things... ;-)

-Vince
No matter where you go, there you are.
Alzhy
Honored Contributor

Re: EVA 5000/3000 + VCS 4.01

Hmm.. so An upgrade to 4.01 will result in loss of data and an eventual restoral? What if we are upgrading from 3.028 - which was mentioned as a requirement before one can go to 4.01?

Vincent, can you please point me to an HP resource link or documentation stating this?

Thanks!
Hakuna Matata.
SAKET_5
Honored Contributor

Re: EVA 5000/3000 + VCS 4.01

Vincent,

ok, so thats really news to me!!!

I was involved in a few discussions around this topic and nowhere was it mentioned that data loss occurs when you do a VCS upgrade from V.3.028->V.4!!

I have also been in touch with our local HP Engineer who has already done this upgrade on a couple of sites - the upgrades went real smooth - NO DATA LOSS or CONFIGURATION LOSS occured!

Don't you think loosing 100s of TB data just for an EVA VCS upgrade would simply be classed as "craziness"??? Also a point where people would rather chuck their EVAs outta their machine room and let the competitors walk in!

Sorry, nothing was aimed at you...you just happened to hit a sore point!!

Regards,
Saket.
Leon Rosier
Respected Contributor

Re: EVA 5000/3000 + VCS 4.01

I assume you mean VCS version 4.001?

There is NO need for a restore of all data!!!

See the document i attached.

Leon
Vincent Fleming
Honored Contributor

Re: EVA 5000/3000 + VCS 4.01

My apologies!!!

This just goes to show that you can't be right all the time.

The last time I looked, the VCS4.XX required a backup/restore operation.

...I guess they fixed that. Those sneaky engineers... I must have missed the advisory.

You guys sure do keep me on my toes!

Regards,

Vince
No matter where you go, there you are.
Mohanasundaram_1
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: EVA 5000/3000 + VCS 4.01

Hi Nelson,

I have done this VCS 4.001 upgrade on EVA5000. There are 2 things I would like to clarify on what was said already,

1) The securepath is indeed supported with vcs 4. You need SP3.0F SP1 for the active/active controllers.

2) There was no data loss and I upgraded the firmware and re-imported the VGs using the map file. create map files before you vgexport.

Now for some glimpses of the upgrade itself.

1) Ensure the FCMS patches and SP pre-requisite patches are in place.

2) Install ULM from the application media.

3) I created a map of LUNs with VG on each server. record the wwLUN ID through spmgr display. This will be very useful in case of any problems after upgrade.

4) install the latest Fibrechannel drivers. You can download from website.

5) Upgrade the firmware of the FC cards using fcmsutil. Again, download firmware files from web and check fcmsutil man pages for options.

6) In case of cluster, modify the cluster lock device file and re-distribute the binary.

7)The same FC cards can work for active/active and active/passive controllers.So you can have SP for both type of EVAs on the same system.

8) The only problem I had is during SP installation. I had to re-install it from the /tmp directory and it worked.

I am pasting below the clues I wrote for myself for this activity,

Pre upgrade
------------

fcms patch
sp patch
qpk
hwe
diag
hba firmware
ULM software
sp

Post Upgrade
------------

Perform re-install of 3.0F sp1 from /tmp.
activate Auto discover in autopath for persistent.
activate retrieve for retrieving settings over reboots.
activate load balancing.
change ownership of device files in each volume groups (raw logical volumes).

All the best.

With regards,
Mohan.
Attitude, Not aptitude, determines your altitude
Andrew_168
Regular Advisor

Re: EVA 5000/3000 + VCS 4.01

Hi all,
One thing you may want to take into consideration is the possible performance hit you will take, the EVA3000/5000 only has one mirror port (Unlike the 4/6/8K) and as such any data passing from the owning controller to the controller servicing the request has to go over this port, along with all the mirrored cache data. I hadn't thought to much about it until a chat with a HP presales guy brought it up, it was him that mentioned the possibility of a performance hit.
Andy