HP VSA Installation & Configure

[danielyk168]

Hi everyone,

I'm planning to set VSA for my client and running some lab to test it out. From the HP StoreVirtual Storgae VSA Installation & Configuration guide p21, uder the best practices, there are:

For the VSA for vSphere, be located on the same virtual switch as the VMkernel network used

for iSCSI traffic. This allows for a portion of iSCSI IO to be served directly from the VSA to

the iSCSI initiator without using a physical network.

it said portion of iSCSI traffic, ok but where is the rest of the traffic go through? and it seems like mixed with the management traffic ? does it relate to the default eth01?

For the VSA for vSphere, be on a virtual switch that is separate from the VMkernel network

used for VMotion. This prevents VMotion traffic and VSA IO traffic from interfering with each

other and affecting performance.

so for vmotion, set the default eth01 for this?

I'm not sure the purpose for these two default vnics, and do I have to set two different ip with same subnet?

In CMC, why I have to set virtual ip and not using the two default instead?

Thanks for any input

Regards

Daniel

[oikjn]

I don't to vmware so I'm not sure 100% on there, but for the HP system, the management traffic is on the same network as iSCSI so there is only one NIC per VSA.  What they are suggesting is that the vNIC be located on the same network that the rest of your iSCSI network traffic would go on so that you don't have to send traffic on that VSA OUTSIDE of that one box and then back in on another port.  What may be getting you confused is that they said "portion", but I aassume they say that because they assume you have at least two VSA systems on two seporate computers so that since all traffic has to go to both boxes you always will have at least one box.

Think about this... if you have the VSA with sole access to a pNIC (call it pn1) and all other traffic goes through another pNIC (call it pn2), all traffic on the VSA would have to go out pn1, to the external physical switch, and then back in to pn2.  If you have all the traffic on the same pn1, then esx can then do the internal switching to allow the traffic to go to the correct vNICs without going out to the external switch.  This can save a lot of bandwidth and latency when you are talking about using multiple VSAs since each VSA also sends replication data on the same NIC.  

[Casper42]

VSA and LeftHand/P4000/StoreVirtual in general are meant to be clustered. Multiple nodes combined to provide extra redundancy and speed.

So if the VSA Virtual Machine is using a Port Group on the same vSwitch that the ESXi machine is using for VMkernel iSCSI access, then any comms between that *1* VSA instance and the local ESXi server never even hit the NIC.
But because of the clustering, some of your comms will hit OTHER VSA instances on other ESXI servers and thus those will always come through the physical NIC associated with that vSwitch.

[Prakash Singh_1]

Hi,

For HP Store Virtual 4000 series SAN Solution querries you can also visit the HP Guided troubleshooting tree.

Below is the link for HPGT:

http://h20584.www2.hp.com/hpgt/guides/select?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=4118659&lang=en&cc=us