3par 8200 Storage Network Best Practices

[foobarbaz]

Thanks in advanced to anyone who can point me in the right direction or answer my questions. I am new to 3par storage. I have a new 8200 I am in the process of setting up. I am trying to find in HP's documentation where it spells out "best practices" for setting up the storage network for ISCSI. Can somone point me to this document? The 8200 is active active and it has two controllers with two ISCI ports each. I need to know what HP recomends for the 8200, things like; single switch or dual switch, stacked or unstacked switches, one storage subnet or two storage subnets, a seperate vlan for each subnet, etc. For example should I do the following:

• Two switches unstacked/unlinked
• Two dedicated storage subnets, one for each switch. For example (see below illustration): ctrl0 p1 is IP 192.168.1.1 (switch1, vlan1) and p2 is 192.168.2.1 (switch2, vlan2). And for ctrl1 p1 it is 192.168.1.2 (switch1, vlan1) and p2 is 192.168.2.2 (switch2, vlan2).
• Two unique vlans, one for each switch/subnet, and all ports untagged

        Server
    /  /          \  \
switch1    switch2
  |    |           |    |
p1  p2       p1  p2
 ctlr0          ctlr1

[Sheldon Smith]

A quick search of the Internet for 3par iscsi best practice points to https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?sp4ts.oid=8737813&docLocale=en_US&docId=emr_na-c04873990 .

[foobarbaz]

Thanks @Sheldon Smith. I have already read that document and unfortunately it falls way short of the specifics I mention in my question. Ironically it is noted in multiple places with the following statement "This was configured for test purposes only, and is not a recommended production configuration". So where then is the recommendation production configuration. Most storage vendors spell out best practices for their hardware in a production environment, HP 3par seems to fall way short of providing this in any of the documentation I have read.

[Bharatkumar1]

Hello,

I found a public article and the link is provided below for reference:

http://sawpro.atlanta.hp.com/km/saw/view.do?docId=emr_na-c04098962&hsid=79413063&sz=100000.

http://sawpro.atlanta.hp.com/km/saw/view.do?docId=emr_na-a00027368en_us&hsid=79413063&sz=100000

Hope this helps.

Note: While I work for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, all of my comments (whether noted or not), are my own and are not any official representation of the company

[foobarbaz]

@Bharatkumar1 Both links require a hp employee login.

[Bharatkumar1]

Greetings,

Apologies for the inconvenience caused. Kindly check the below link and let me know

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c04777548

Note: While I work for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, all of my comments (whether noted or not), are my own and are not any official representation of the company

[Sheldon Smith]

---

@foobarbaz wrote:

Ironically it is noted in multiple places with the following statement "This was configured for test purposes only, and is not a recommended production configuration". So where then is the recommendation production configuration.

---

The test case used when writing the document had an IRF (Intelligent Resilient Framework) connection between HPN 5900CP and HPN 5700 switches. It is a test bed.

There is most of a page of recommended switch configurations starting in the same paragraph as the statement you noted on page 21.

As far as network topology, see chapter 3, Figure 2 Topology of a basic iSCSI SAN.