MSA 2040 plus disk enclosure, auto tiering RAID50?

[chris_skyline]

we have an MSA 2040 with an additional SFF disk tray and a total of the following disks.

3x 200GB SSD

12x SFF 10K 600GB SAS

11x LFF 7.2K 2TB SAS

The plan was to have 2x SSD's as a RAID mirror plus a hot spare, and have both the 10K and 7.2K disks set up as 10 disk RAID50's (plus hot spares)and then use the auto-tiering to m anage the whole lot and just present a few 2TB LUN's to a pair of VMware hosts (both dual direct attached).

the problem is, that it seems like if i want to add a vdisk disk group, it won't let me use RAID50, only RAID1, 5, 6 or 10?

the documentation seems to indicate that for auto-tiering to work at all, that i HAVE to use vdisks, but i can't actually see this confirmed 100% that it can't function with linear disk groups.

sooo, can we make this work, or will we have to try something different, maybe RAID10?

also, it's looking like we might have to have two separate groups entirely to get the most out of both controllers as they can't both share the same disk groups in a pool?  which is going to create a problem with the performance pool as we had only budgeted for a single two SSD mirror and a single hot spare?

thanks.

[giladzzz]

Hi

you should create two virtual pools because each pool is controlled by one controller

also if you want to create a perfotmance tier ( only aplies to SSD + SAS) you need a license

and the 2 disk froups must have the same reaid level.

you can look at HP MSA 1040/2040 SMU Reference Guide  on page 79 (virtual disk groups)

http://h20565.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?sp4ts.oid=5386548&docId=emr_na-c04220794&docLocale=en_US

HP MSA 2040  Best practices

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c03983029

HP MSA 2040 Storage Configuration and Best Practices for VMware vSphere

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/4aa4-7060enw.pdf

Regards

[chris_skyline]

yeah, we'd kind of come to the conclusion that we'll need to either do two pools, or just use the 2nd controller purely as a failover.  

we DO have the performance licence purchased, we just haven't recieved it yet from the vendor.  We had assumed it would already be configured, but it wasn't, so we're waiting for them to get back to us with it.

it's only a small environment, less than ten vm's shared between two vmware hosts, so i don't think we'll have any performance issues as a result of not splitting the disks into two pools.which comes to our real problem.

MSA 2040 supports RAID50 - which is why we bought it.

MSA 2040 supports vdisks and auto-tiering  - which is why we bought it.

But, does it support a RAID50 configuration WITH vdisks and auto-tiering?

There doesn't seem to be any supporting documentation saying that it doesn't allow that particular config, but at the same time, the v3 GUI  won't let me create a RAID50 vdisk group, but it WILL using a linear one.

And there's our problem.... :(

there is *some* hope that it is something that will appear once we have the advanced licencing set up, but I'm not all that optimistic.

[KJohnsonCDA]

I wish HP would put a cookbook together explaining how to setup the performance tier, and snapshots for volumes on the virtual pool..... It's my opinion that the virtual disk use is not nearly as polished as the old linear type disks that we're used to with the P2000's.

From my experience:

The auto tiering performance teir will only work if you're using the virtual pools.  
You can install your 3 SSD's as a R5 virtual disk , and your 10K SAS disks as Raid 10 virtual disk, BOTH in the same virtual Pool, and the auto teiring will kick in automatically - as you create volumes and expose those volumes to hosts from the virtual pool, you'll see data start to fill the SAS disks, as well as the SSDs.

I feel like a beta tester for their virtual pools, as snapshots don't work like they do with linear disks, volume copies can't be done - and I've been fighting my own personal battles with dissapearing partition info on a HyperV cluster Shared volume that is on one of these virtual pools.