When the Eva 6300 storage first arrived, we thought it was an HP refrigerator. When we opened the product, we saw two separate units with disks and many cables. The setup had to have a purpose; first we installed VMware 5 on a server – it was our first time with VMware 5. By the way, you notice the VM 5 performance difference immediately on first install.

After installing VMware, it was time for our main task: we opened the storage, stacked the modules, and connected the fiber controllers as described in the manual. We added a fiber connection to an Ethernet card and completed hardware setup.

Do not let the connections in the picture confuse you.

We installed the software that came with the Eva, but the fiber card had to be connected directly to the storage. So we continued the installation via the controller. The default IP of the controller is 192.168.0.1. You can reconfigure it later; we added a secondary IP to the Ethernet and ping started responding. We connected to the control card on the controller via port 2373. The control unit works even when the device is off. We noticed from the logs that the device had not powered on correctly. Important: the enclosure must be powered on first, then the control unit. After confirming the device is up properly, start configuration via the Eva storage configuration program. First disks are inspected (8 disks come with the device) and grouped with a name. Then while configuring the disk group, you are asked whether to use 1 or 2 disks for spares; in these devices it is disk space rather than a disk that is reserved. Remember that every safety measure costs disk space :). The same menu shows what RAID layout and how much disk space you can achieve. Generally for the best balance of safety and disk space, RAID 5 is selected. With some spare + RAID 5 we obtained about 1.2 TB. Datastores are created and named. After disk configuration, host(s) are created and Ethernet links assigned. We had one, so we made one assignment and completed the storage-side configuration. On the VM side, when you add (source) the datastores, you will see the datastore names defined on the storage. The rest is up to you.
Hope this article is useful.

Umman Kurşun