EVA 8100 and VMware vSphere 5

[MarcelGr]

According to SPOCK the EVA 8100 (and older) is currently not supported with VMware vSphere 5. Does anyone maybe know if this is likely to change?

P.S. This thread has been moved from HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage to Storage Area Networks (SAN) (Enterprise). - Hp Forum Moderator

[Paul_Carroll]

Is there any possible news on this as we are looking to upgrade to vShpere 5.0 and are pretty amazed that that 8100 is not in the compatibility list especially as HP have been happy to recently sell us additional shelves for it?

Is there a good technical reason why vShphere 5.0 is not supported or is this just a cynical move by HP to get customers to dump the 8100?

[MarcelGr]

I was surprised to see a response, I thought we were the only EVA 8100 customer in the world that wanted to run vSphere 5!

The closest thing to an official answer I got from HP:

Question:

_________

Older arrays such as EVA4100/6100/8100 are going to support vSphere 5?

Answer:

_______

Unfortunately, there are no plans to support vSphere 5 on the EVA x100 arrays, as those arrays have been OBSO since 2009.

[Paul_Carroll]

I'm surprised there isn't more noise about this but perhaps there aren't too many 8100s out there. I have been told that the previous model was a right turkey so perhaps many avoided the 8100.

Anyway I have not read this in detail but from an intial look it is saying the 8100 is compatible with vSphere 5.0?

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA1-2185ENW.pdf

I've asked the HP User group to see if they can get some clarity from within HP rather than the usual support channels.

Paul

[Jan Soska]

Hello,

we have the same problem with older array EVA6000. We have the same official info from HP - there are no plans to support new OS's like RH6 and vSphere5. No light on the the end of tunnel.

But this is similar with other vendors - Dell, etc

Normally you will have no problem to run EVA8x00 with vSphere5 or RH6 (we tested it on Eva6000), but - I you run into problems, nobody will help you (nor Vmware, I asked them.)

Jan

[Bo Mathiasen]

We were quite surprised to learn that HP are not planning to support VSphere 5 on EVA 8100. We bought our EVA 8100 just 3 years ago, and are planning to keep it in production for at least 2 more years. This support policy effectively prevents us from upgrading to Vsphere 5, as we do not run production on unsupported configurations.

If anyone from HP is monitoring this thread. Please pass the message along to the ones making this decision. This is causing much trouble and we, as a long time HP customer, are very disappointed with this.

Bo

[Jan Soska]

Hello,

you are right you are angry - EVA8100 retired in September 2009 I think. Try to push your HP representative - maybe it will help. We have no succes with EVA6000 - retired in February 2006.

Jan

[Sebastian.Koehler]

What I've seen, you should disable some advanced storage features of ESX 5.0 to have it running smoothly with legacy EVAs. (ATS, accelerated datamover etc.) Have a look into the vmkernel log to see if no errors are thrown.

Regards,
Sebastian

[Paul_Carroll]

Going via the UK User group I did get a reply from within HP in the UK to say that if enough people push for this then they may get resources freed for testing.

Along with others I am pretty unimpressed with this as our EVA 8100 is only 3 years old and when we purchased it we made it clear it was on the basis of a five year life cycle. We didn't expect to be dumped with a system that HP were obviously not committed to. Our suppliers must have known this and we are going back to them to ask what is going on.

Seems like HP want it all ways. I was asked by HP why we thought it necessary to upgrade to vSphere 5! Well for a start some of your own tools are no longer supported on vSphere 4.

Sigh

[chjones_]

We have two EVA8100s at different sites, both sites have two C7000 enclosures and about 10 ESXi hosts at each site. We have upgraded to vSphere 5 with no problems. However, you don't get the VASA integration like you would with newer storage so features like Datastore Clusters and Storage DRS arent used to their full extend. The only metrics used is the IO latency from the host, which could be skewed by a number of things. We've been told the 8100 is end of support mid-2014 so we're looking at replacing them, but it's not cheap. We have 12 fully populated shelves at each site and of course the current disks can't be used in a newer HP SAN which is kinda annoying. I'm hoping my management will look at other vendors like Netapp or EMC but I bet they'll go HP again unfortunately.