EVA - New Configuration

[Karthik S S]

Hi,

We received a new EVA and are trying to configure the same. As per the document we have input the WWN number through the OCP. After entering we are getting a Flashing message on the OCP saying,

WWN: xyz zyz ..


The connectivity between the HSV100s and the Disk enclosure seems to be OK ( it came pre wired).

As per the doc. we are supposed get some Storage System name once we enter the WWN.

How do I proceed?? Pl. help.

Thanks,
-Karthik S S

[Andrew_168 · Accepted solution]

Hi,
You have completed the first step, all further configuration takes place using the Management Appliance. Connect this to the fabric, login and start Command View EVA, just bear in mind if the EVA is running VCS 3.010 you may need to update command view EVA on the appliance to 3.1.

[Karthik S S]

Hi,

Thanks for those inputs.

The VCS version I have is 3.010. And the CV EVA version is 2.1. When I tried doing a discovery of devices it gave me a error message saying that No controllers could be found. Is it due to the version problem?? Is it must to have CV EVA 3.1 to configure EVA3000/VCS 3.010??

Pl. Clarify,

Thanks
Karthik S S

[Karthik S S]

Any update??

-Karthik S S

[Uwe Zessin]

OK, here are some tips to manage the discovery:

- wenn CV-EVA doesn't see any EVAs it shows a [discovery] button as you have already seen, right? Pressing it does sometimes work...

- If not, there is another [discovery] button that you can reach through "agent option". And then [Discover storage systems]. I don't know if they are the same or not, but I found out that it is worth a try.

- As the next option you can try to restart CV-EVA. From the entry screen select "Settings" and (Manage Tools). You see a list of applications. Mark the radio button on the left side of 'command view eva' and you should see that the 'Tasks' column allows you to enter the 'Stop' task. Press it, then the green 'Next' button on he bottom of the screen. Wait until it is stopped which can take some time and the press 'Finish'. Now select 'command view eva' again, but now choose 'Start' task. After the restart, please wait some time (I'd say a minute) so that the task can settle and then go back to "Devices"->"command view eva".

[Orrin]

Hi Karthik,

This is normal, when you enter the WWN number on the HSV110's you then have to enter the checksum.

Assuming you have done that, you then have to assign a storage name through the SMA.
Only then is the configuration saved. Until then if you power off the HSV110 and power Up , you have to enter the WWN and Checksum again.

On the SMA click on the discover devices, then through the Command view EVA V3.0 ( If you are not at this version upgrade to this version before you continue). Select Uninitialised storage System from the HSV Storage Network Folder in the left Pane.
Click on Initialise on the properties page.
( At thi spoint if the SMA does not have a liscence loaded for the EVA you are prompted to enter a liscence key)

The enter a name in the text box to identify the storage system sontroller.

Enter the number of disk to include in the default disk group ( All is good )

Select data protection level and then Finish. At this point configuration is saved and you are good to go.

The next steps will be to get the WWN of the HBA's on the hosts and use them to configure the hosy connections. After that you should create your Vraid's and you're good to go.

Hope this helps.
Regards,
Orrin.

[Karthik S S]

Uwe/Orrin,

I think the problem is due to the CV EVA version. I am in touch with our storage team to get the appliance installed with CV EVA 3.1.

As you suggested I tried doing a manual discover but still it couldn't find the controller.

Thanks,
Karthik S S

[Karthik S S]

All the connections from the EVA and EMA appear to be proper. Infact we have only one SAN switch [It is not connected to any exisiting SAN but a standalone(?) switch] to which all the 4 ports of the EVA and 1 port of the SMA are connected. I have not configured any zoning yet. Is it required to configure zoning also?? I thought it comes into picture only when you need to secure the storage/LUNs across different server but not for the initial setup.

-Karthik S S

[Uwe Zessin]

Karthik,
is that a new switch with zoning cleared? What model?

LUN masking can (and I think should) be done completely on the EVA.

You use zoning to prevent too much/ the wrong ports from 'talking to each other'.

For filtering LUNs a switch needs the ability to look up the SCSI commands in the payload of the frame. Most switches simply cannot do that, but that's not a problem as the EVA has built-in LUN masking.

[Karthik S S]

Yes that is a brand new switch. All I have done with that switch is to assign a IP to it.

-Karthik S S

[Karthik S S]

Hi,

Finally it turned out to be a FC cable issue. We had to replace the LC-SC cable that was connected from SMA to the FC Switch. CV EVA was able to discover the EVA and I created Diskgroups/Vdisks all is fine :-)

Now I need to connect host machines and try presenting the vdisks to the hosts.

Thanks,
Karthik S S

[Uwe Zessin]

Congratulations on your progress! Sometimes it is a simple problem that makes us stumble.

How did you diagnose the problem? Didn't the switch show a link?

[Karthik S S]

Yeah .. intermittantly the link was going off. And also the cable what we had was locally purchased and was not a branded one ..!!

Thanks for your help ... keep watching this space .. I will be back to bug you again :-)

I have posted this success at,
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=427387

-Karthik S S

[Mike Naime]

That sounds like a corporate penny pincher to me. Spend 1/2 million on the hardware, and then try to save 5$ by purchasing cheap cables.

I keep fighting my network folks over the 50 Micron VS 62.5 Micron fibre cables.

Fibre channel wants 50 Micron. Network wants 62.5

[Orrin]

COngratulations!! Karthik...

Good going.

Sorry, I couldn't follow the forum due to work.

Best of Luck.. see you online again sometime.

Regards,
Orrin.

[Karthik S S]

Hi Mike,

It was definitely not a cost cutting measure from the corporate .... but since the shipment of the FC cables got delayed by a week and we wanted to have the EVA up and running we had to settle for that second quality cable .... :-( ...

Thank you Orrin ...

-Karthik S S

[Uwe Zessin]

Mike, I'm curious:
which network installations require 62.5 today? Or is that some, well, 'backward' people?

During one of my EVA installs last year I stumbled over such an electrician. I did call the european connectors 'american trash'. When we sent them the required couplings (they are 32 ampere single phase, which is not that common here in Germany) he refused to install them because they were missing the 'VDE' sign. VDE was a german authority, whose standards were replaced by european regulations just, gasp, 2 years ago!

[Uwe Zessin]

Oops. Of course it wasn't me, who said bad things about the connectors - it was the electrician...

[Karthik S S]

Hi Guys,

I even created a vDisk and presented it to a host. But still facing lots of problem with securepath/vdisk presentation. We have a RP8400 with 4 cell single hard partition that is configured with 4 virtual partitions. I am facing a strange problem that with some vPars the EVA vdisks are not getting recognized (even after presenting them to that particular host). FC link from the vPar to the switch are proper. Even a "ioscan -f" shows a list of HSV devices but when you do a "ioscan -fnC disk" it does not show the vDisk. Also "spmgr display -u" reports that no vDisks are presented to the host. I tested the follwoing things,

1. vDisk presentation on EVA.
2. Associated host WWN to the vDisk
3. FC cable and Link

all these are proper.

Have any of you configured EVAs with vPars?? Are there any known issues?? (I have installed Jun 2003 App. Pack and Dec 2003 HW enablement pack along with the patches that are required for the secure path 3.0)

Thanks,
Karthik S S

[Mike Naime]

Well, in this area. (Kansas City) the local contractor that does our patch panel installation (Watcher Electric) says that they are using 62.5 fibre for network patch panels all over the city. I could care less what they are using at other sites, I care about my site.

We are adding a new 6000+ square foot data center that I am supposed to be able to put 2 new EVA's into on April 2nd (If they keep to the schedule). Before we had several meeting about the subject, our Network manager wanted to install 62.5 all over the place. We finally got our Network manager to agree that we needed 50 Micron Fibre after we got supporting documentation from both HP/Compaq, Hitachi, and Brocade stating that we needed 50. He still contends that we could function on the 62.5 stuff, but finally agreed that they would install 50 for our SAN patch panels, and use 62.5 for the network gear.

[Uwe Zessin]

Karthik,
you say that your IOSCAN show any HSV devices? What devices? Note that the EVA always presents a 'pseudo device' at LUN 0. It is used for 2 reasons:

1) the Storage Management Appliance (SMA) needs a way to talk 'inband' (over Fibre Channel) to the EVA. A new EVA, as you know by this time, does not have any meta data at all. There is not virtual disk whose LUN the SMA could use and later it would not make sense to devote storage just to make the SMA happy. The HP VA7xx0 arrays use such a trick for LUN 0 - they create a small (1MB) virtual disk.

2) For hosts there are different ways to find out which LUNs they can access on a SCSI target (your EVA in this case):

a) they can simply poll all possible LUNs, but that can take quite some time, because the FCP address space is _much_ larger as the one for parallel SCSI (usually 15 targets with 8 or 32 LUNs).

b) SCSI-3 has a command 'REPORT LUNS'. A host issues that command against LUN 0 (see?) of a target and the target is supposed to return a list of available LUNs. (Well I have to admit that this is what I beleive what happens - I have not read the standards documentation, but I got told some of this during StorageWorks trainings).

Back to your problem:
Did you set the 'Operating System Type' of your host(s) to 'HP-UX'? It is very important that you select the correct entry! Do a reboot of the affected system/vpar.

You write you are using 'Secure Path 3.0'. Is that really the version you are running and not something like '3.0B' or '3.0C'? (3.0D has just arrived). Which version of HP-UX are you running? Not every version of SecurePath does work with every version of HP-UX.

-----

On another read of your text it may sound like it works perfectly on some 'vPars', but not all. Is that correct?

[Karthik S S]

Hi Uwe,

Even on sundays you are watching itrc?? that is great :-) ..

Well I was able to solve the problem. It looks like I need to do complete shutdown of the nPar inorder for the vPars to see the devices and establish the FC link after the installation of Secure path and related patches. Attaching the output of ioscan and spmgr.

Now I have another question. spmgr display shows that I have 4 paths to the vDisk but only one path is active. Even after I did "spmgr set -b on ", it uses only two paths as active paths. The other 2 paths that belong to the HSV contrller 2 still shows as standby. But I want to use all of the 4 paths in order to have a better bandwidth. How can I set this??

thanks,
Karthik S S

[Karthik S S]

Output of ioscan -f has some devices like this,

ext_bus 18 1/0/8/0/0.1.1.0.0 fcparray CLAIMED INTERFACE FCP Array Interface
target 9 1/0/8/0/0.1.1.0.0.0 tgt CLAIMED DEVICE
ctl 19 1/0/8/0/0.1.1.0.0.0.0 sctl CLAIMED DEVICE HP HSV100
hsx 0 1/0/8/0/0.1.1.0.0.0.1 hsx CLAIMED DEVICE HP HSV100
ext_bus 19 1/0/8/0/0.1.1.255.0 fcpdev CLAIMED INTERFACE FCP Device Interface
target 10 1/0/8/0/0.1.1.255.0.0 tgt CLAIMED DEVICE
ctl 35 1/0/8/0/0.1.1.255.0.0.0 sctl CLAIMED DEVICE HP HSV100

and so on ..... ( a total of 12 HSV100s listed)


and ioscan -fnC disk reports,
disk 15 255/255/0/0.0 sdisk CLAIMED DEVICE HSV100 HP
/dev/dsk/c26t0d0 /dev/rdsk/c26t0d0

(because I have presented only one vdisk)


How do I relate these two outputs?? How to identify the paths?

-Karthik S S

[Karthik S S]

-The version of secure path that I have installed on hp-ux is v3.0C.

Thanks,
Karthik S S

[Karthik S S]

Hi Uwe,

Congrats ... you are at the top among the new ITRC members (storage) ....

top new members
Below are the top active members who have been with the forums for less than 6 months
» Uwe Zessin 158 pts.
» Kevin Harlan 138 pts.
» Ronald Hendriks 131 pts.
» Julian Perez 105 pts.
» Sanjay Kumar Suri 83 pts.

Look at the end,
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/familyhome.do?familyId=120

Only 82 more points for you to become a ITRC Pro ... Keep it up ..!!

-K