Basic questions about HP SVSP 2.x

[mujzeptu]

A few simple questions regarding SVSP.


1) How intense is the VSM side? Can the servers be older 360s with less CPU and RAM horsepower?

2) Along the lines of question 1, how intense are the VSM servers at the FC level? Do I need 4 or 8Gb FC HBAs? Can I get away with 2Gb or use trunking on DC to make up the difference?

3) It appears I have to have qlogic HBAs in the VSMs, run win2k3 and have xeon processors? Is all of this true?

[Niels Vejrup Pedersen · Accepted solution]

Hello

1) If you buy the SVSP starter kits it's shipped with DL360 G6's... Which equals a lot of horsepower - but i'm not sure it's needed.

2) Since the traffic going to the VSM is only a small percentage, you could go with 4 gigs without any problem.

3) If you use SVSP 3.0 the servers can be W2K8 also.

Regards

[mujzeptu]

1) We dont have the starter kit with servers, just the svsp 2.0 setup.

What we have is spare g4s. Not sure if thats enough horsepower? Do the VSMs just run the management software and nothing else?

2) What is a small percentage? Can I get away with 2gb hbas? I didnt know if its just small management traffic or actually can affect performance....

3) Didnt realize there was a svsp 3.0. I saw 2.1 came up with changes, but now there is a 3.0? What new/different with it?

Can I download the 3.0 software to run on win2k8 with my 2.0 hardware? Or am I SOL?


Regards

[mujzeptu]

Can I make the VSMs virtual machines on an ESX server?

[NMG]

1) VSM acts as the SVSP domain manager and also have the role of "data mover". SVSP also performs asynchronous mirroring via iSCSI or FC and therefore it require CPU power and mostly memory.
For testing and evaluation you can use weaker hardware than specified by the docs; but this is not supported for production environments.

2) Use 4GB, in case of testing and evaluation 2GB QLogic HBAs will work fine but this is not officially supported.
HBA trunking is neither supported nor recommended.

3)Yes, this is what is specified by release notes.
SVSP 3.0 (Petra) will support W2k8 but its planned be released by the end of January, 2010 or the first days of February 2010 (If HP doens't change the dates).