EVA3000 Loop A disabled

[Edwin Grech_1]

My Client has an EVA3000 with 4 drive enclosure and 32 36GB 15k drives.

Recently the EVA started giving a lot of erros on all drive enclosures (O.F.en.05) and discovered that Loop A had become disabled. These errors would clear after 1 or two hours but the Loop has remained disabled ever since.

HP support have tried replacing various I/O A modules from enclosures and all copper fibre cables between shelves. But till now no success. One drive was also replaced since it indicated some loop communication errors (from diagnostic tests) but still loop has remained failed.

To make matters worse, since the Loop A is disabled, the EVA will not add any new drives to any disk groups. So we cannot add back the drive that was removed from the group!

Has anybody had any similar problems and any solutions??

[Bostjan Kosi]

Hi,

do you have any idea on VCS and disk drive FW versions...I have like 38 EVA systems and some of them had lots of backend loop problems, but most of them dissapeared after the upgrade to at least 3.020 and HP03 to HP05, and HP07-HP09 disk firmware upgrades (done in a bunch as a codeload operation right after the VCS code upgrade). Also the Drives having problems were faster indetified as bad and removed from the Groups by EVAs.

BR
B.

[Ken_76]

Yes. Loop would fail, recover 24 hours later, fail again. Went on for months while local HP techs replaced cables, I/O modules, etc. Escalated to national level thru Colorado support center which resulted in an expert from out of town. Still took a week or so to isolate the problem.
The plan was to remove one enclosure at a time from the loop until it stopped failing. That would at least show which enclosure had the problem. Then to start ungrouping drives to determine if it was the enclosure or a drive problem. Turned out to be a bad drive or two. No problems since. Our drive firmware and VCS are not current, nor do we have fibre loop switches. All scheduled to be done long ago, but could not be done until the EVA was stable.

[Bostjan Kosi · Accepted solution]

Newer versions of VCS (3.014 and up) have a much better backend loop stability....so I would suggest realy at least VCS upgrade a.s.a.p and after a few weeks, so that you are shure that problematic drives are discovered (drives with so called rogue effect) and marked bad. After they are replaced, you can do a all EVA disk fw upgrade....

BR
B.

[Edwin Grech_1]

Thanks a lot for the replies. Hp Support are suggesting that I replace I/O A modules on two of the shelves. I am working on this at the moment and will update you with the progress. The VCS firmware is 3.01, so this needs to be upgraded as well. It seems that the VCS firmware is more to do with this loop failure than the I/O modules, from your replies.

Any advice on how best to upgrade the firmware?

[Uwe Zessin]

Start with getting hold of all documentation and software (adapter and switch firmware, platform kits, ...) required for the new EVA firmware release.