P4300 conceptual best practices? Can't figure out how to set it all up!

[ROnanian]

We have an HP StorageWorks P4300 G2 MDL SAS Starter SAN Solution (BK715A). It's two boxes that look similar to an average Proliant DLxxx, totaling 16TB, and some software. We need to connect VMWare ESX 3.5 and 5.0 hosts to it for Microsoft Exchange 2010/Lync, Oracle, and a variety of Windows and Linux servers.

Unfortunately, I'm unable to find a Best Practices whitepaper or a previous post on this forum that covers the sort of questions I have...so here's a couple to start with:

1. Does all data pass through the Centralized Management Console (CMC) or some other software component that needs to run on hardware other than the HP P4300 boxes? Should I set aside a server with lots of network bandwidth just for this?
2. If the CMC goes down, does the SAN stay up (via iSCSI connections from my servers directly to the P4300 boxes)?
3. Each P4300 box has two GigE ports. My Dell SAN currently is on two separate iSCSI-only VLANs for bandwidth and fault tolerance, which works great. A P4000 whitepaper I found suggests keeping all ports on the same VLAN. Which way is actually better?

I'd love to just plug everything in and start playing with it, but it seems like the licensing is pretty strict so I'd hate to install the CMC on the wrong machine and have to deal with that... 

 P.S.This thread has been moved from Storage Area Networks (SAN) (Small and Medium Business) to HP StoreVirtual / HP LeftHand Storage-HP Forums Moderator

[Bart_Heungens · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I propose to start with the following document:

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA3-6918ENW.pdf

You should point the iSCSIinitiqtor of your servers with the VIP address that you had to configure in the CMC when you created the management group and cluster of storage nodes... The VIP address is an additional address that floats on top of your storage nodes...

The servers connect directly with the storage nodes, no CMC intervention there. Like the name says, it is a management console... If it goes down, off course the SAN stays active...

The NICs will be configured as a bond (NIC teaming) which means that the NICs must be able to communicate with each other so you have to set all network connections in the same VLAN...

Kr,

Bart

[ROnanian]

Ah, very good. The server I want to use for the CMC will do, without needing 8Gb of bandwidth. Also, I don't know how I missed that PDF...I found a couple others for using the P4000 series with VMWare but not that one.

So, before I reconfigure my switch for all iSCSI to be on a single VLAN, should both of my P4300 units be on the same VLAN or should each unit be on a separate VLAN?

I'd guess that the answer is, again, a single VLAN. In none of the documents have I seen any suggestion of using multiple VLANs.

[Bart_Heungens]

Hi,

1 VLAN for all storage nodes and servers connected to it... Best practice is that you have dedicated switches for the storage part so you don't need even VLAN's actually... Most of my setups are without VLAN-ing...

The document I mentioned is the latest version released... I keep a list of all usefull documents and information regarding P4000 and other HP stuff on my blog... Take a look there from time to time to find the latest stuff...

Kr,

Bart

[Steve_NetAdmin]

Why kind of performance are you receiving with getting with your p4300's? We use Procurve 2810-24g's with a 2gig trunk between the switches and i still only get about ~100megabytes persecond read speed and ~70 megabytes per second write speed.

On the server side we use VMware round robin MPIO, Adaptive Load Balancing on the p4300's, which I'm considering switch over to LACP. 

Am I just expecting too much?

[ROnanian]

Not sure if my setup isn't as good as yours or if my demand is just this low, but I'm not getting anywhere near your throughput.