HP Storage P4500 and vSphere 5 White Paper

[chuckk281]

Adrian had a configuration question:

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Do we have a White paper on the P4500 Multi-Site SAN and vSphere 5?

I found the vSphere 4 white paper @ http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA0-4385ENW.pdf

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Lots of input:

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From Tim:

Try this one:  HP P4000 LeftHand SAN Solutions with VMware vSphere Best Practices

Includes vSphere 5 on page 4.

From Chris:

Not intentionally meaning to hijack this thread but I have seen Vmware People (actual people who work for Vmware), instead of creating one vSwitch of the iSCSI traffic they create 2. One Vmware person also told me Jumbo packets were the standard for ESX and P4000.

And from another Chris:

Sure, creating two different PortGroups and assigning them to the iSCSI Initiator in the host would use MPIO for load distribution, rather than trying to rely on TLB in the vSwitch Load Balancing policy.  I would not ever consider hosting VM and iSCSI traffic on the same single or pair of pNICs on a host.  Unless one were to implement NetIOC, which requires a DVS and the Enterprise Plus license.

From Mike:

How would you handle the Failover Managent (FOM)?  You have to put a VM in the ISCSI V-switch.  With P4800 it is a must since you can’t present the same vlan to the same LOM.

Second according to the p4800 Doc, you are not using TLB in the V-switch since there are 2 kernels one attached to each single Nic.

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VMware has a step by step website to assist with this configuration

Specifically

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.vsphere.storage.doc_50/GUID-C476065E-C02F-47FA-A5F7-3B3F2FD40EA8.html

but the whole process is listed here

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.vsphere.storage.doc_50/GUID-C476065E-C02F-47FA-A5F7-3B3F2FD40EA8.html?resultof=%22%69%73%63%73%69%22%20%22%63%6f%6e%66%69%67%75%72%61%74%69%6f%6e%22%20%22%63%6f%6e%66%69%67%75%72%22%20

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Add your comments or suggestions?