Abstract
This document defines the “Best Practices” for Enterprise Virtual Array Cluster (EVA Cluster). These best practices are strongly recommended based upon our field experience with the EVA Cluster solution and should be followed as closely as possible. The intended audience for this document is customers and administrators who configure and use EVA Cluster, testers, installers, and troubleshooters of the product.

Introduction and philosophy of best practices
The HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array Cluster is a bigger and faster product than a single EVA array. It comes with Command View software that makes it simple to manage, saving management time and money, and reduces configuration errors. You can help reduce errors and unnecessary expense by implementing a few best practices and enhancing your EVA Cluster for its intended applications. This paper highlights some basic configuration rules and tradeoffs for enhancing the EVA Cluster for cost, availability, and performance. Getting the most from your HP EVA storage has never been easier.

EVA Cluster can offer ease of use for day-to-day operations. However, the breadth and flexibility of EVA Cluster capabilities coupled with the implementation as a fabric based storage solution introduces multiple opportunities for issues with performance and stability of the solution.

This document is intended to describe practices that HP has learned from field experience that will help avoid issues with performance or stability. However, if a user chooses to operate beyond these best practices, this document describes tools to allow the administrator to pay extra attention to factors mentioned in this document, such as congestion of fabrics and saturation of array controllers. Careful monitoring can help to avoid issues. This document is a “work in progress,” questions, discrepancies areas that need to be clarified and areas where the recommendations do not meet your particular need should be directed to EVACluster@hp.com. It should be noted that this solution is different from the SVSP solution; there are different features highlighted and exposed for each of the products. Therefore this guide should only be used to reference the EVA Cluster solution, likewise refer to the SVSP best practices as a reference for that solution.

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