Tuesday, January 17, 2012

How to Configure an HP EVA 5000 for Windows Server 2008 R2 MPIO

We have an older HP EVA 5000 and we wanted to use it with Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V, Cluster Shared Volumes, and MPIO.  With the newer EVA 5000 active-active firmware, we're running version 4.1 or 4100, we simply had to configure the hosts in the Command View EVA manager.  Set the operating system type to custom, and enter 00000004198009A8 as your custom type [documentation for server 2008 available here].  Your host should look like this in command view:

Then discover MPIO devices on your server and you should see "COMPAQ HSV111 (C)COMPAQ".  I believe with the active-passive firmware you would see "COMPAQ HSV110 (C)COMPAQ".

With the active-passive firmware (something like EVA 3.110) you would need additional configuration for each drive you present.  Each drive on each host would need to be configured to use the paths for just one controller at a time to make the drive accessible / usable on older EVA firmwares.  With the active-active firmware no additional configuration is necessary.

If you have an EVA running firmware 3.110 and you want to do this you will need to track down a copy of the newest firmware and make sure your license supports it.  HP will not give you a license to run your EVA 5000 if you don't have one, although we managed to get them to make us a new license after many days of pestering many different people in many different departments.

As of writing the 4.1 (4100) firmware is available on HP's site here: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software9/COL21081/co-55464-1/T3588-10019.iso
and the 3.110 (3110) firmware is available here:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software8/COL19159/co-49829-1/EVA_GL_CONTROLLER_FIRMWARE_v3110.zip

I can't find a link to it, but the the Command View software is in an ISO named HP_StorageWorks_Command_View_EVA_v9.3_Software_T5494_10022.ISO

How to grant full access permissions to every mailbox in Exchange 2010

I needed to access 75 mailboxes across multiple mailbox databases and didn't want to grant myself full access permissions to them one at a time so i went searching for a solution.  This nifty command granted me access to every mailbox in the company:

Get-MailboxDatabase  | Add-ADPermission -user <myusername> -AccessRights GenericAll -InheritanceType All


I found a variation of this command in a technet forum post available here and modified it to give myself access to all mailboxes, and set inheritance.

HTH