HP P4000 SAN SANiQ 9.0 Kernel Panic Issue

http://jpaul.me/?p=2684


At some point after 208.5 days of continuous runtime, a counter in the SAN/iQ Linux kernel may incur a divide–by–zero error that leads to a kernel panic, which causes HP P4000 storage systems running SAN/iQ software version 9.0 or 9.0.01 to go offline immediately. 


After ten minutes, the HP P4300 G2, HP P4500 G2, HP P4800 G2 and HP LeftHand DL320s storage systems will perform an Automatic Server Recovery (ASR) followed by resumed operations. Other storage systems running SAN/iQ version 9.0 or 9.0.01 will hang indefinitely until manually rebooted.


I would definitively be upgrading if it were me!

Post about the Equallogic MEM plugin for vsphere 5.0

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/11/dells-multipath-extension-module-for-equallogic-now-supports-vsphere-50.html

I spoke with Andrew McDaniel, one of DELL's Lead Architects for VMware based in Ireland, and he was able to supply me with some additional information about this MEM. Firstly, since the MEM is essentially a PSP, devices from the EqualLogic array continue to use the Native Multipath Plugin (NMP) from VMware. This handles basic tasks like loading and unloading of MEMs, path discovery and removal, device bandwidth sharing between VMs, etc.

whip up a Cloud in a 17-inch box with 8 pinches of HP P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance

http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Around-the-Storage-Block-Blog/New-Converged-Storage-recipe-Cloud-in-a-box/ba-p/102465

Favorite quote

With licenses installed on all servers, what should you do with the server’s available drives? Take that pool of virtual machine-ready resources, which is currently DAS, and whip it into shared storage, with 8 pinches of HP P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance. These licenses will be installed in a VM on each server and the entire pool of disks can be turned into a clustered, highly available SAN.

Quick little post on EqualLogic and upgrading for upgrading for vsphere5

http://vinfrastructure.it/en/2011/11/upgrade-path-to-vsphere-5-the-storage-part/

Lefthand, HP StorageWorks P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance

Interesting security bulletin on the P4000

http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2011/Nov/72

SUPPORT COMMUNICATION - SECURITY BULLETIN

Document ID: c03082086
Version: 1

HPSBST02722 SSRT100279 rev.1 - HP StorageWorks P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance, Execution of Arbitrary Code

NOTICE: The information in this Security Bulletin should be acted upon as soon as possible.

Interesting post about Equallogic

Some of my favorite quotes are

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/167573-equallogic-ps6100xv-s

 I really came to find their products dead simple to use, with a uniform interface across models that made it simple to work with.


...


 I love it. It is easy to setup and manage. I only had to make a couple of calls to support during the setup process and those calls went very smooth.


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With some of the Cons being:

My experience with Equallogics is that generally the hardware is ok but the software and firmware of late have left a lot to be desired.

The current firmware seems to be stable but all the version 5 stuff up to now has had bugs that caused some big issues. I am not a fan of the HIT kit, it slow and flaky and may stop working if you upgrade it, which is blow if you rely on it to drive your replication. Also you have to ensure you are on the right hard drive firmware as some of them are buggy as well.

Replication works quite well, best if you send multiple streams up a your pipe, with Jumbo frames we get almost a full 1Gb to our replication site.

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