HP LeftHand/StoreVirtual AO and disk sizes/speeds??

[Tom Lyczko]

If we spend for the 10 TB AO version of LH/SV VSA -- how are different disk sizes and speeds managed??
Does one create separate arrays within the server's RAID controller for each type of disk??
And then the Network RAID (10) manages grouping the different drives and AO moves the data around??
Does AO work 'on the fly', what??

I imagine it is still cheaper to buy X quanity of 15k 600 GB drives (I think our planned-to-buy DL380 can be got in 12 LFF form factor) than to buy 1-2 SSD plus Y amount of SATA disks?? Has anyone done price math on this topic??

Thank you, Tom

[oikjn]

if memory serves me correct, you can only add a total of FOUR storage drives to each VSA.  you can make a raid group with hardware or software at the host level and present the disks to the VSA however you want (VHD/VHDX/VMDK/passthrough).  Once presented to the VSA, you can then assign each disk to either Tier0 or Tier1.  The VSA uses all disks like a raid0 array so you better make sure your underlying disks are actually raided.  At that point you now have up to four disks which will comprise your total usable storage for the VSA and two storage tiers which will allow you to have up to 10TB licensed usable space.  Lets say you have 8TB of slow Tier1 and 2TB of fast Tier0.  Your storage pool will see 10TB usable, but the VSA will shift around the "hot" data to stay on the 2TB Tier0 space and move whatever is left to Tier1.  This is all done in the background unmanaged by you beyond simply enabling or disabling AO at the LUN level.  If its enabled, data for that LUN can go into Tier0, if its disabled, the data is 100% on Tier1.  There is currently no way to tell it to be 100% in Tier0.

[HPstorageTom]

The VSA 2014 can have up to 7 "disks" mapped to it. Disks is used here in the sense of vhd/vhdx/vmdk/passthroug as Oikijn mentioned it.