Had a chance to work on the latest HP MSA2000 G3 controllers. These controllers are really fast and make working on almost any iSCSI/Fiber SAN a snap.

While trying to setup replication using the wizard, I ran into the following error after enter the remote SAN’s information:

“There are no vdisks in the remote system. Please select another remote system or create a vdisk in the remote system before continuing.”

But wait… I DO have a Vdisk on the remote SAN. I was trying to replicate a 600Gb Vdisk volume that sat on a 880Gb Raid 5 set with 733Gb usable. The remote SAN was setup identically, same number of disks, same setup.

AH, but was missing is, and HP does not tell you, you need at least 25% free space to setup snapshots. See the original Vdisk is “standard” mode. It has no snapshot capacity. Instead, you have to convert it to a “Master” volume that has at least 25%, or in my case, 150Gb free. I had 133Gb free, and in the words of Maxwell Smart, Secret Agent, “missed it by that [hold your fingers close together] much”.

This left me with having to rebuild the main vdisk, vd01, from 600Gb down to 550Gb, and yes, replication now works.

While I did report the issue to HP as to the error being to cryptic [hey, how about “you don’t have enough free space to create a snapshot, we need at least 25%” would have helped], but doubtful they will ever change it.

Carl