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Re: unique partition with EVA8100

 
Davide Moronetti
Occasional Advisor

unique partition with EVA8100

Hi all,
we have just bought an HP EVA 8000, made by 12 disk enclosures with 14 500Gb FATA disks each, for a total of 168 disks and more or less 80 Tb of storage space.
before the EVA, we have two DL380G5 in a cluster configuration with windows storage server 2003 32 bit intalled.
our issue is the following: we would like to build a unique 80Tb volume to be seen by users.
HP Italy said us that this is not possible, so we will have to have 28 partitions of 2Tb each...and this is unaccettable! do you know if there's a chance to have an unique 80 Tb partition??I can't believe that a so powerfull machine has this big limit,,,
thanks in advance
Davide
16 REPLIES 16
Chris Rosan
Valued Contributor

Re: unique partition with EVA8100

David,

What do you mean by a "unique" volume?

The EVA presents disks to a host. Most operating systems can only handle that LUN being presented to 1 host at a time without a special file system or additional tools (such as GFS on linux).

What you would usually do then is "share" a drive or folder on a drive so that users can map the drive over the network (windows example but similar on linux with Samba).

What is it you are trying to achieve?
Davide Moronetti
Occasional Advisor

Re: unique partition with EVA8100

Hi Chris,

what I would like to do is to configure the EVA as a single 60Tb volume, then share it and present to the users over the network.
But since I understood from HP technician is that this is not possible, I have to create 28 volumes of 2Tb each in EVA,then from Windows 2003 machines create a stripe over the 28 volumes,,,but honestly I don├в t find this a good and reliable solution,,
Is there a way to do what I want?
Many thanks
Davide
Chris Rosan
Valued Contributor

Re: unique partition with EVA8100

What are the users using the space for?

I don't think you understand what the EVA is for. It's a SAN device which you can setup multiple virtual disks (virtual disks) of whatever size you need and present the disk to a server/device. These devices would typically be a server.

I've got an EVA8000 with Fibre drives (not FATA) and this is how we do it.

If you want to use it for ISCSI then that's a bit different. I don't have ISCSI and haven't looked into it as i don't have a need for it.

Can you give me more of an idea of your environment? Does your EVA8100 have ISCSI presentation components/software?

If you have a bill of materials and can attach it that will help.
Davide Moronetti
Occasional Advisor

Re: unique partition with EVA8100



Hi Chris,
Our infrastructure is : 2 DL380 G5 in Cluster configuration, 1 EVA8000 with 12 disks shelf with 14 FATA disks of 500Gb each.
What we would like to have is a single Virtual Disk of 60Tb, or how many is needed, but to be presented to the server as a single logical volume.
HP technician said us that EVA can make virtual disk of just 2Tb each, no problem if we could see a single logical volume on the server, but neither that is possible.
Are you aware about this limit (virtual disk size)?also, do you think is possible to let the DL380 see just a volume?
Thanks again
Davide
Chris Rosan
Valued Contributor

Re: unique partition with EVA8100

Have you tried to create a volume of more than 2TB? What does it do when you try?

Are you running EVA8000 or EVA8100?

What is the operating system on your hosts?

What's the storage space being used for? There may be another way to do what you're trying to do.
Davide Moronetti
Occasional Advisor

Re: unique partition with EVA8100

Hi Chris,
To be honest I don├в t know the exact error got on there, I simply guess the system didn├в t allow that.
We are running EVA 8100 , and DL380├в s run Windows Server Storage server 2003.
The space will be used as a storage for our music archive├в ┬ж
Chris Rosan
Valued Contributor

Re: unique partition with EVA8100

Can you post the error you get.
Urban Petry
Valued Contributor

Re: unique partition with EVA8100

Davide,

even the newest EVAs with v6.x firmware are not able to create a single virtual disk beyond 2TB in size. This is due to the internal handling where the EVA uses some memory-resident tables for storing information about each vdisk (allocated blocks etc.). I heard rumors about future firmware versions lifting this limitation (by sort of doing RAID0 over several vdisks internally) but I don't think it will be in the next months.

On the Windows server side don't forget that dynamic disks (which you would need to use to sripe several EVA vdisks into one volume) are not supported on clusters! I think there is third-party software that makes this possible (from Veritas, overtaken by Symantec now), but have no experience with this.

The only thing that you could do is use DFS or mountpoints (which is supported on clusters) to "mount" each disk into a separate subdirectory of one big name space (e.g. drive letter). As long as a single directory's content doesn't grow beyond 2TB then you're fine. Not a nice solution, but the best I can think of ...

Urban

Chris Rosan
Valued Contributor

Re: unique partition with EVA8100

David,

Do the hosts have to run windows? Have you looked at trying a linux solution (still using the EVA).

If you're interested i can look into it for you.