Hey Mark,

As you probably know I have installed dozens of VA's to hp3000 over the years...

First, I would ONLY install a VA7410... over the years, I have learned the VA7410 are much more reliable than the VA7100's.

You want to make sure that you have the latest firmware on the controllers, (don't remember off hand is it HP22 or 140? ) And yes, max out the controller memory to 2GB per controller.

Then make sure you have the latest firmware on the drives.   The good news is that the firmware has not changed in the last five years, so hope is it is already current.

The official HP supported configuration requires either a PC or HP-UX workstation running CommandView.  Since the VA7410 has dual head controller, you can have two connections to the HP and one connection to the CommandView workstation.  The commandview workstation is required to update the firmware, and do some performance logging.

When configuring the VA it is always better to have lots of small LUN's instead of a few big ones.  What that means is, make your LUN 9 to 18GB in size.  Use the Autoraid, not mirrored.  The VA7410 is rated at 45,000 I/O's per second, there is nothing the HP3000 can do (especially the A-class) to make that VA sweat.

Yes HAFO is supported, and is set up in SYSGEN.  What I do is put the even LUN's on one controller and the odd LUN's on the other.  Since both controllers "see" all the luns.  HAFO is a snap.

The HP supports 2GB/sec...

Make sure you have the correct PDC firmware on the A-class, I don't remember specifically for the the A-Class, but the N-class is 43.43.  If you don't have the right PDC, don't even bother with the VA.

Remember FCSCAN is your friend.

HTH,
-Craig




--- On Fri, 9/12/08, Mark Landin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Mark Landin <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Best practices for using VA7xxx on MPE systems
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date: Friday, September 12, 2008, 2:38 PM
> Although this isn't about Sarah Palin or energy policy,
> I hope someone
> is in the mood to read it anyway. :)
> 
> We are strongly considerng replacing our 939/020 running a
> Nike Mod 20
> with an A-class running one of the VA7xxxx arrays.
> 
> What are the current 'best practices' in
> configuring the VA arrays for
> the best redundancy and the best performance on MPE boxes?
> Do you
> build a one large pool and carve out LDEV's? If so, how
> many? Do you
> explicitly define LDEV 1 as a RAID 1 or RAID 10? Does it
> matter? Can
> MPE do HAFO on dual-controller/dual HBA models?
> 
> (Note to vendors: This is not a solicitation for quotes. I
> already
> have a number of vendors I work with and am not interesting
> in
> expanding my "circle of trust" at this time.)
> -- 
> "If hard work were such a wonderful thing, you'd
> think rich people
> would have kept it all for themselves" - Lane Kirkland
> 
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