EVA3000 and securepath question

[Charles McCary]

Group,

hey - we're looking at purchasing a couple of rp7420's, and an eva3000. We will partition the 7420's and also utilize serviceguard.

Are there compelling reasons that I would need to consider purchasing securepath as well?

If so what are they?

[Dave Hutton]

The biggest reason is failover.
We were originally under the impression we didn't need Securepath.

You can't use pvlinks like other disk arrays. We ended up after a few days of trying and several calls that never amounted to anything we bought it for our servers.

Once you have it, it makes your ioscan look much cleaner, adds failover and load balancing.

[Charles McCary]

What about LVM failover - if you have two paths to a LUN and you add both paths to a volume group, doesn't lvm handle failing over if a path disappears?

[Craig Rants]

There are a lot of great reasons to use secure path, and since you are using an EVA which does striping for you, your lvm level of complexity is minimized.

With securepath you can do:
load balancing w/ options
automated recovery of links
get wwlun info

Highly recommended for lun management.

GL,
C

[Charles McCary]

What about cost - can someone ballpark how much this s/w costs?

[Vermeulen Peter]

We once had a quote for secure path when we just implemented our EVA together with an hprp5470. The price (for 5 license) was 25,812.00 pounds. Let's hope the prices have gone down by now !
At the time our budget did not allow for it so we did not buy it so far.
Like said before our ioscan looks complicated as well but so far we did not experience any problems with not having the s/w. Although I must say we did not have a real crash or problem in this 1,5 year that we are live. In our volume group we have setup the four links (1 + 3 alternate links). I believe we also tried with unplugging one of the cables when we were testing the configuration. The disks could be accessed without any problem. I must say this test was only brief since the cable was unplugged for a short period of time.

[Uwe Zessin]

""I believe we also tried with unplugging one of the cables when we were testing the configuration. The disks could be accessed without any problem.""

It sounds like you just hit the other other port of the same controller. I doubt if would have worked if you'd hit the other controller.


No offense intended, but it does not look like you have really 'tested' the configuration if you just pulled one cable for a short time and are not even sure about it.

[Ted Buis]

I really think that you need secure path for ServiceGuard support (or for it to really work for that matter). The EVA are not designed like the VA's or other pm-HP arrays. They came from Compaq and things are done differently. The pvlinks won't really work.