Maximum logical volume size for FCA2214 HBA

[zwarts]

We have a Proliant DL380 G3 system with a fiberchannel hostadapter, a FCA2214 (which, I think, is also known as Qlogic QLA2340L). Up to last week this worked satisfactory. Due to the increasing need for more storage space, the logical disk on the SAN has slowly grown, which has never been a problem. Last week we passed the 2 TB size of the logical volume. Now it does not work anymore. This is not caused by the driver of the Operating System, for already before booting the OS we have a problem:
If, during the powerup self test, we press Ctrl/Q to enter the BIOS utilities, and we try to perform a data test on the disk, then too few blocks are tested. It looks as if blocks are counted with only 32 bits. It looks as if bit 33 is not used, although the specifications say that the FCA2214 is a 64bit adapter.

Nowhere in the specifications the maximum size of a logical volume is mentioned. Our question is whether this adapter supports disks greater than 2 TB. 2 TB does not seem very big these days, as with already nine 250 GB disks in a SAN one can create such a volume.

NB. The firmware version of the FCA2214 is 1.33.

[Colin Topliss]

Hi,

According to the data sheet, the BIOS is only 32bit
http://download.qlogic.com/datasheet/14035/FC5058001-00B.pdf

Look on the second page near the bottom. The fact that you see problems in the BIOS might be a red-herring.

Which OS are you using?

As a rule on UNIX systems, we try to keep the LUN size and LVOL sizes to a more manageable size. We certainly wouldn't consider VGs and LUNS of 2TB.

If you are running Linux, there was (maybe still is - its a bit late - 01:00am - to go trawling through the kernel mailing lists right now) a 2TB limit on the read capacity in sd.c (the SCSI device driver).

There certainly used to be a 2TB device size limit (corresponding to a 32bit Index on 512 byte blocks):

The ext2 filesystem is the default filesystem for Linux. It supports partitions of up to 4 Terabytes in size (1 Terabyte is 1024 Gigabytes), while a single file can be up to 2 Gigabytes. However many kernels only support block devices up to 2TB, so the practical limit is 2TB. Filenames can be up to 255 characters long.

For more info look at:
http://www.linux.org.mt/article/filesystems


Col.

[Mike Naime]

I'm not sure where you looked, but on a 35TB EVA, I can currently only server up a 1TB LUN to AIX or VMS, and I can server up a 2TB LUN to Micro$oft stuff.

AIX and VMS will support 2TB and dynamic LUN expansion in the newer OS version that we have not upgraded to yet. Still waiting on Application/Oracle validation before upgrades.

Mike Naime