MSA2012i + DL380G6 + Xen

[Wendell Dingus]

We were handed this hardware and asked to get it working to the point of getting some VMs up and running on it and in production, rapidly. A customer purchased it, we were given almost zero documentation, we're experienced with FC SANs but this is the first piece of iSCSI equipment we've touched. Ahem...

So, I'm sure many of our questions could be answered via proper documentation. Can anyone point that out, we're having no luck finding it ourselves. Some more specific questions in case anyone has any pointers or suggestions and again we can probably answer them ourselves via documentation I hope...

This unit has 2 controllers so 4 physical NICs. Will each controller provide ~fault tolerant access to disks "owned" by the other controller in the event one fails? Can we get 4gbit total throughput or only 2gbit?

iSCSI IP assignments and network sizes. Any suggestions? With a planned max of 2 physical servers with 2 available NICs for storage in each we're thinking of not having a switch involved, servers wired directly to the SAN controller. Having said that though, pointers on IP addressing on the "Storage NICs" and interfaces on the SAN and subnetting?

We did get a single interface on one server configured up and talking to the server and a RAID-5 array built on half the disks (15K SAS 300's BTW). Xen seemed happy with it, we created a VM, we installed CentOS 5.3 on it. We ran bonnie++ to test performance and were thoroughly unimpressed. I/O speed maxed at around 100mbit. The command "ethtool eth2" shows the link at gigabit and full duplex.

Thanks!

[Jason.Pan]

Please check the user guide here:

http://bizsupport.austin.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Product.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&taskId=101&contentType=SupportManual&docIndexId=64255&prodTypeId=12169&prodCatId=304617