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Best practices for setting up HP P4300 G2 and volumes on HP CMC v. 11.0?

 
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lyngsie
Occasional Collector

Best practices for setting up HP P4300 G2 and volumes on HP CMC v. 11.0?

I cannot find any best practice documents for configuring Hp StoreVirtual Centralized Management Console v. 11.0. The only one I can find covers v. 9.0 through 9.5. Is this still current for 11.0? This is the one:

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA3-6918ENW.pdf

 

This document only gives some basic insight into how volumes should be created and managed. We are migrating to this storage from an NFS storage, so I have very little knowledge on how to create and manage volumes. Which approach should I take initally and still keep in mind that it should be able to scale out in the future?

 

Can someone help me on these matters?

9 REPLIES 9
oikjn
Honored Contributor

Re: Best practices for setting up HP P4300 G2 and volumes on HP CMC v. 11.0?

I don't know if there is any newer one out there, but the information in that one is pretty much identical for v11.  Only differences are the refrences to the version numbers.  Sadly, there are no new features in v11 vs. v9.5 that would make that guide outdated other than the list of supported operating systems.

lyngsie
Occasional Collector

Re: Best practices for setting up HP P4300 G2 and volumes on HP CMC v. 11.0?

Thank you for answering.

My real headache here is how to manage the amount and sizes of volumes. How should I approach this?

oikjn
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: Best practices for setting up HP P4300 G2 and volumes on HP CMC v. 11.0?

what do you mean exactly?

 

Pretty much you should make every volume a thin provisioned volume as if you use thick provisioning, it will also generate thick snapshots!

 

There currently isn't a built in way to shrink LUNs once they expand so you have to plann of when that issue happens.  I generally create LUNs ~500GB in size so I can move things around more easily than a single 4+TB LUN, but its all up to you.

 

I would suggest that you create a single FULL provisioned LUN names "reserve capacity".  I created mine to be 50GB in size, but I use VSAs which are easier to increase capacity with.  The idea is that the SAN will stop serving IO when it becomes 100% full (which is a risk w/ thin provisioning) and this reserve space gives you a very quick way to get your SAN functioning again if you ever run into that situation... kind of like having a little gas can in your car in case you run out of fuel.  I chose 50GB because I thought that gave me enough time to react and increase the storage at our growth rates, but if you have to use physical nodes and go through a multi-week purchasing process, then you might want to keep more space available.

lyngsie
Occasional Collector

Re: Best practices for setting up HP P4300 G2 and volumes on HP CMC v. 11.0?

That is exactly what I mean! My knowledge of SAN storage administration is limited, as I have been used to NFS as our VM storage, and I did not need to have mutiple volumes for best performance. Using HP P4300 G2 (2 in total, raid 5 on each, totalling 12TB with network raid-10), I have read, that for best performance, I should distribute my VM's accross multiple volumes. I might just take your advice and use 500GB volumes, as you suggest, and also create this reserved full provisioned reserved capacity as well. Those number actually seem okay in relation to our total storage capacity.

 

The new emvironement is still being planned (thus my initial questions), and I have acquired HP Insight for vSphere. Is that the one you are using for you environment?

 

I also assume, that Vsphere SDRS would take care of some of this VM distribution inside the volume cluster in accordance with the continous monitoring from within vSphere?

oikjn
Honored Contributor

Re: Best practices for setting up HP P4300 G2 and volumes on HP CMC v. 11.0?

You seem to actually care about understanding the system (and thats good).  I don't mean to be a jerk about it, but if you have a pretty good understanding of computers and are basically technical, reading the manual helps a LOT.  It won't give you the suggestion about the extra reserve LUN, but it does a very good job of explaining what settings to chose and how things work which goes a long way in making sure you configure your SAN in a way that works best for YOU.  

 

VMware doesn't do as good of a job as the HP+MS DSM so load balancing is really achieved by spreading out across as many LUNs as you can manage.  Its a tradeoff between size/flexability/ease of organization/performance and thats a very site-specific detail. 

 

I'm a MS shop so I can't give great adviace on how to best set it up with esx, but maybe someone else will chime in here, but if not, the manual really does help.

Florian Schmutz
Frequent Advisor

Re: Best practices for setting up HP P4300 G2 and volumes on HP CMC v. 11.0?

Hi lyngsie 
Its depending on wath you want to do on your storage. 

Im guess if you migrate from a NFS its was a netapp filer with ESX Datastores?

If yes think first about your Backup maybe you want to snapshot the luns storage based. In this case i would recommend to create for each vm a LUN in thin provisioning mode.

 

So you see its hard to tell. ;)

 

But yes i agree with you may Lefthand documents are outdatet or better were not updatet. So you can only guess that the old recommendations are still activ ;)

 

Cheers

 

Florian

lyngsie
Occasional Collector

Re: Best practices for setting up HP P4300 G2 and volumes on HP CMC v. 11.0?

Thanks, oikjn. I do try to understand this system the best I can. I simply have to in case of disaster recovery, performance issues and so on in the future. I am the only admin of this so...

The possibility of having thin-provisioned LUNs really scares me though, but I guess this just have to be monitored, and in general I must commit more time to administrate this type of storage.

Do you agree that this is the manual I should read?
http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c03983799.pdf

Thanks for taking your time helping me along here.
lyngsie
Occasional Collector

Re: Best practices for setting up HP P4300 G2 and volumes on HP CMC v. 11.0?

Hi Florian,

 

Yes, I migrate from a NetApp filer with ESX datastores. If backup must be considered as part of planning the storage, I must read up on that first. I never used snapshot features on NetApp. I see I have even more snapshot options using this storage. I use Veeam to backup VMs now, so I might not even need any snapshot features on this storage either or perhaps you even reccomend using these LUN snapshots as the primary backup?

oikjn
Honored Contributor

Re: Best practices for setting up HP P4300 G2 and volumes on HP CMC v. 11.0?

that link looks pretty good.  Its kinda sad that the document is so old, but its actually current.  More documents can be found here: http://h20566.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/template.PAGE/public/psi/manualsResults/?sp4ts.oid=4118659&spf_p.tpst=psiContentResults&spf_p.prp_psiContentResults=wsrp-navigationalState%3Daction%253Dmanualslist%257Ccontentid%253DUser-Guide-%252528how-to-use%252529%257Clang%253Den&javax.portlet.begCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken&javax.portlet.endCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken 

 

Snapshots are great to ASSIST backups, and are ok for short term packups (like 1-day or a couple hours), but you do NOT want to use them as a backup solution in place of a real backup.  What happens when you have corruption on the base LUN, you cannot use a snapshot to fix that problem.