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Re: unique partition with EVA8100

 
Davide Moronetti
Occasional Advisor

Re: unique partition with EVA8100

Hi,
thanks Urban for cleared (and confirmed) my dubts about EVA configuration.
Chris, our clients run windows xp and servers in front of EVA will be use Windows Storage Server 2003.
using Linux could be a working idea, but I don't think HP will support a costumed installation.
thanks again for all
Davide
Chris Rosan
Valued Contributor

Re: unique partition with EVA8100

David,

The servers attached to my EVA run linux and linux is FULLY supported (and even sold by) HP.

You can use linux as a windows fileserver and it is quite easy to setup. You can even cluster it and it will automatically failover when to the redundant node when required.

If there isn't a political reason you HAVE to use windows then it's definately an option.
CA1019066
New Member

Re: unique partition with EVA8100

We have the same issue. We have Windows file servers, Notes servers and SQL servers that will soon need logical volumes >2TB.

On non-clusters we can (and have) work(ed) around this with spanning disks, but this requires dynamic disks which are not supported on clusters.

It seems that this 2TB restriction is not a technical limitation of the EVA, but rather is a safety measure that was put in place in order to prevent the carving of LUNs that were unusable in Windows.

However, this limitation in Windows has been lifted since 2003 SP1.

We had hoped this child-proofing safety would be lifted in the 6.x firmware but it has not.

Over the next few months we are looking at the possibility of mission-critical databases that we can no longer support on the EVA, and should this happen, senior management will force us to move to EMC, which we already have in our datacenter.

Can someone from HP tell us in what release will the 2TB limit be lifted and how soon it will be available?

Thanks!
Chris Rosan
Valued Contributor

Re: unique partition with EVA8100

Kevin,

I suggest you speak with your HP account manager about the situation and tell them that they're going to lost another customer if it's not resolved (and you won't be the last to go due to this issue).

Have you tried splitting the SQL DB & LOG onto different LUN's of the EVA on different drives on the server?

I don't know Lotus Notes but can you do something to split it in the meantime?
EG - With exchange you can run multiple "information stores" on different disks of windows and split the data into the information stores. There are a number of advantages to this in an exchange environment (as i said i don't know anything about Notes).
Davide Moronetti
Occasional Advisor

Re: unique partition with EVA8100

Hi all,
just to keep u up to date.
HP sorted this out installing Polyserve Cluster Gateway application that,using ps file system, let us to create 4 partitions of 14 Tb each...not the best but better than 28 ones.
is also true that is not actually possible to manage a 80 Tb partition with Microsoft file system, and it wouldn't be safe too.
Thanks all for the support
Davide
CA1019066
New Member

Re: unique partition with EVA8100

Thanks, the call wih HP has already been placed by an associate.

The logs and DB's are already split on different LUNs. The DB is forecasted to grow by more than 2TB per year and it must be one contiguous DB.

I'm familiar with Exchange's abiity have upto 20 DB's. However (don't shoot the messenger) our Notes envionment uses a single file for each mailbox and our notes admins insist that we need 1 logical drive holding every mailbox in the company (end users don't hit this server).
Chris Rosan
Valued Contributor

Re: unique partition with EVA8100

Again, not knowing notes, but if that was exchange and you wanted to maintenence to it, not only would ALL the mailboxes be offline, but the maintenence would take FOREVER!!

One of the reasons we split into several Information stores is so that when we perform Offline Defrag's of the information stores, it only takes down half the company and takes half the time, AND requires half the disk space sitting doing nothing during a defrag.