Upgrading Firmware on EVA4100 SAN

[Mpoole83]

Hi guys,

We currently have 2 EVA4100 controllers and have Command View EVA V7.0 . We need to upgrade the firmware possibly so that we are not limited to a 2TB LUN.

We run a virtual Environment and want all our system drives on the same LUN, but this has filled 2TB very quickly.

Can anyone point me in the direction of what we need to upgrade? Would it be some firmware and / or upgrading from v7.0 of Command View?

Any help is greatly appreciated as I have tried to find downloads and help articles but not found anything concrete as yet! cheers,

Mike

[Víctor Cespón · Accepted solution]

EVA4100/6100/8100 are limited to create 2 TB LUNs and there are no plans to modify the firmware to support bigger LUNs.

This has been done for the next generation of EVAs (4400/6400/8400), which support up to 32 TB now.

Latest firmware for an EVA4100 is 6.220 and needs Command View 9.1.

Also check some VmWare best practices whitepapers, putting too many vmdks on a single LUN is usually a bad idea.

[Uwe Zessin]

VMware ESX server cannot deal with LUNs larger than 2 TeraBytes - 512 Bytes
(= 0xFFFFFFFF Blocks a 512 Byte/Block)

[agent006]

If you are, as assumed, running ESX then you could look at using extents to increase you VMFS volume size.

[Gordon Sjodin]

You are better off having more smaller LUNs for the purpose of load ballancing the SAN fiber channel paths. Otherwise you will have all system drives running through one path into the SAN. I am not sure but the new Round Robin loads ballancing may eliminate this.