P4000 VSA in Production?

[Paul Hutchings]

Back on this.  Does anyone know how maintenance/support on the VSA's works?

We got a 10 pack with our virtualisation SAN so I'm assuming that if we renew the care pack on the SAN SKU it also covers support on the VSAs?

I can't see a single SKU for VSA support anywhere though.

[ccavanna]

This is the SKU we use. As we have purchased additional VSA licenses over the 10. The purchase of an additional license includes 1 yr of support. To renew the support on them the SKU i have is UW577E.

I am also under the impression that when you use the licenses off the 10 pack the support goes against the physical node but i am not sure of that.

[David_Tocker]

A quick idea - since most lease companies have already collected the price of the equipment they often will sell the gear to you at a resonable cost - perhaps find out how much it will cost to buy the 3yr? old gear - it may be less than you expect.

[Nate Stuyvesant]

Are the HP P4000/4500 (fka LeftHand SAN/iQ) modules ALUA-compliant? If not, would this be correct:

esxcli storage nmp satp set --default-psp VMW_PSP_RR --satp VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA

instead of

esxcli storage nmp satp set --default-psp VMW_PSP_RR --satp VMW_SATP_ALUA

[5y53ng]

Not sure, but I am using VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA without any problems.

[David_Tocker]

Just to add to this - we have some P4300 G2s here - they -are- DL180s with different stickers on them :)

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13248_na/13248_na.HTML

You can take a DL180 and load the P4000 software on it and register it's NIC MAC for the licence and away you go... Assuming you somehow have a spare P4000 licence key.

(I dont think you would be allowed to use the VSA licensing on it, although... it might work, havent tried it, but beside which it would not be legal use of HPs software/licensing i imagine)

[Chris_Kluka]

I am about to build a VSA / Hyper-V cluster with the following:

BladeCenter (BLc7000)

• 2x vFlex-10 Modules (455880-B21)
• 10 fans
• 6 1500w PSU

Compute Nodes (4x):

• Windows Server 2012 Datacenter
• BL460c Gen8 10GB FLB CTO Blade (641016-B21)
• 2x E5-2670 (662064-L21, 662064-B21)
• 16x 16GB ram (672631-B21)
• 2x 300GB 6G 15K SAS drive (652611-B21)
• 1x FlexFabric 10Gb Nic (684212-B21)

SAN Nodes (hyper V + VSA) (2x):

(same configuration as the compute nodes, without windows, with 4 sticks of 8GB ram instead of 16 of 16)

Storage Nodes (2x)

• D2200sb Expansion Blade /w VSA bundle (AP881A)
• 12x 900GB 6G SAS 10K drives (619291-B21)

The full BLc7000 will have:

• A 4-node Hyper-V cluster totaling 1TB ram and 96 cores
• A 2-node VSA NRAID10 + hardware raid 5 totaling 6TB usable 

The appealing part of this build for us is that the BLc7000 enclosure will house an entire server room in a single U10 box. We will have tons of computing power for VM's and 6TB of SAN. 

Details on the intended VSA deployment:

Each AP881A will be adjastent to a Gen8 blade. The Gen8 blade will run Hyper-V server. The hardware raid will be configured to have two raid-5 volumes of 6 disks each (5 usable each = 5*600GB = 3TB + 3TB). 

The two 3TB Volumes on each server will be presented to Hyper-V. Hyper-V will create four 1.5TB VMDK files and present the 4x 1.5TB disks to VSA.

VSA Will take the 4x 1.5TB disks and Raid-0 them together. Then, each VSA node will be network raid 1-ed together.

in all, this should total 6TB NRAID(1) + software raid(0) + hardware raid(5).

Does this seem like a good idea? Is there a better way of configuring the raid with VSA? Can I simply tell the 2x VSA's to have 1x 6TB Raid-6 ? or 1x 6.6TB Raid-5? or 1x 6.0 Raid-5 + hot spare?

[Urimuqi]

does anyone have P4000 VSA training materials?

[ryan_1212]

The DL180G6 is not the same hardware are the P4300G2\P4500G2, although they use the same chassis, controllers and memory. 

The DL180G6s have a much cheaper motherboard, which lacks iLO. It does have a management port but it is a basic version. HP calls it LO100 to distinguish. It is the same type of management interface as a dell or supermicro entry level server would have.

The SAN hardware is actually better quality than an off the shelf DL180G6.

[RonsDavis]

I use ESXi free for my VSA deployments. VSAs will not use more memory than they need, and do not cache. Therefore for my nodes any more than 8GB of RAM per node is wasted. (5G for VSA, ~1G for overhead).

I don't use Hyper-V, so I can't comment on how much RAM you need for that deployment. 

I don't quite understand the disk usage you are suggesting, is the Software RAID-0 in the Hyper-V OS? If so, why bother?

I would just present 2TB LUNs from the host RAID. Depending on your R/W needs, RAID 5 or 6 may have too much write overhead. I use RAID-10 for my VSAs. 

You assign each of those 2TB LUNs to the VSA, and then the VSA will span the data across them. With this in mind, you will see the best performance if you use one larger set of disks for each node, and split off the LUNs from there. A span fills one volume at a time, so if those volumes are separate disks, you won't be using all of your spindles initially.