Adding 450GB FC drives to EVA4000

[Dennis Devore_1]

I have 3 FC enclosures on my EVA4000 SAN. Space was getting a little tight (69%) so I ordered 10 additional 450GB FC 15k drives. I un grouped 4x 146GB FC drives one at a time. I added 4 of the 450GB drives and allowed the SAN to level (several days). Now I have 98% of my space occupied! I'm cusious as to why adding 2TB of space has caused my occupied space to move from 6.7tb to 9.8tb?

I checked the XCS version on the EVA and it's 6100, I believe that's all I needed to support these drives, right?

Any suggestions? I have not created a single lun (I deleted one small one), but nothing else has changed.

Any assistance is greatly appreciated!

Thanks
Dennis

[AWilliams_1]

I'm not sure I understand your configuration. Assuming you had 42*146GB (actually 42*137GB) drives you should have had a maximum capacity of 5.4TB yet you quote an inital size of 6.7TB at 69% utilisation.
Be aware that if the disk group is configured with single sparing then 2 of the largest disks would be automatically assigned as the spare drives, if you have double sparing then 4 of the largest disks are the spares.

[Dennis Devore_1]

Thanks for the reply. I started out with 8 146 drives (in two separate enclosures) and then 34 300GB drives. I am using double drive failure. So would this bring up my occupied space so much? Since nothing is leveling am I safe to ungroup another drive (I do have approx 500gb available) then add another 450 allow the SAN to level? I'm trying to get all of the older 146s replaced with 450s for now and get everything on each enclosure to match.

[AWilliams_1]

I'm not sure I can figure out how you lost so much space but I suspect it has to do with the way the EVA lays out data with pairs of drives for VRAID1 and groups of drives with VRAID5.
I cant remember for sure whether you can change the sparing down to single on the fly to give you some space back. In any case I would be very wary of removing anymore drives at this stage.
Is there any possibility of removing some vdisks temporarily?.

[Dennis Devore_1]

I could probably free up a few luns and maybe free up another tb if needed. I also have another enclosure I could put install if needed. The esisting luns really only use maybe 5.5-6.5 TB (guessing, I'm at home now) but the occupied space is close to 10 of the 10.5 that is installed. An odd ball is that the avaliable space for vraid has not changed (my copy/paste is messed up but shows 2tb of space).

Capacity
Total: 10475.66 GB
Available: Vraid0
Vraid1
Vraid5
2047.99 GB
1567 GB
2047.99 GB

Could it be an old firmware issue? I thought the 6100 eva4000 was safe for the 450GB drives. I've got 6 more I'd like to make use of...

Thanks again for any insight :-)

[Dennis Devore_1]

Sorry, my last post was a little off... Yes, I can free up more space - maybe 1tb if needed. If I can go to 1 drive failure to try to recoupe I will and don't mind (temp). It's just odd that adding 4x 450 drives and removing 4x 146 cost me 4TB in used space...

Am I right to ungroup each drive, wait than add new storage?

[gregersenj]

Hi You got a mix of 146 GB Disks and 300 GB disks.
Disk protection level is set to double.

As mentioned earlier in the thread.
Duble disk protection level reservers the space of 4 of the largests disks in the groupe.

So, if you remove a 146 gb disk, and add just 1 450 GB disk.
You will loose appr. 600 GB of space.

When you are finished replacing 4 146 GB to 4 450 GB.
You will have 600 GB, more than you had before.

[AWilliams_1]

Are you sure you are reading the available space correctly. By my calculations an additional 1700GB VRAID1 disk will max out the configuration of disks you have, which is what the EVA is telling you.
XCS6.1 will support 450GB drives and your procedure is correct for adding and removing disks.
Have a look at this thread re sparing: http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/bizsupport/questionanswer.do?threadId=1322830&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=470490

[Uwe Zessin]

> my occupied space to move from 6.7tb to 9.8tb?

I don't know off-hand if the 45GB disks used to be supported on XCS 6.1 (which is no longer supported as of this month), but a grown reservation for the so-called "protection level" should not rise the occupancy.

That is a bug in the controller firmware! A workaround is to perform a "controller resync". In most cases it helps to just reboot the system's master controller.

[Sunil Sheoran]

HI
XCS 6.1 with 450GB HDD is not a supported confiuration.for 450Gb disk support Min you should have XCS6110 but that support is also ended on 21 Aug 09 so better to upgrade it to XCS6200 or XCS6220 & CV 9.1

Thanks

Sunil