HP lethand with Cirix storage

[Shevary]

Hi
I am new to Lefthand, we are going to run 2 X Citrix Xen Server 5.6 SP1 on HP Blade C3000and with Lefthand P4300, we are going to run around 12 VMs on both Xen Server, I heard that best way to present your you LUN on your Lefthand to your Xen server would be put your Lefthand on different subnet and don’t let your LAN network to see the Lefthand.
For instance if your LAN on 192.168.X.X and you may put your Citrix Xen server on 192.168.10.50 and setup your Lefthand on 172.10.12.10, then add the Lefthand IP address to your Citrix Xen network management console and then no one on your LAN would be able to see your Lefthand, also we got a consultant he recommended us to implement this, we went ahead we implemented but now we have some issues with that, I will explained it in more details.
We have a second Lefthand and can’t see the first Lefthand (the one above one), so both Lefthand can’t see each other, also it is stopping us to present the LUNs to other server on the LAN, I thought about changing the Lefthand IP address and put on the same subnet like LAN but I am worry to put too much traffic on LAN and kill the bandwidth.
So I would like to know your ideas and as always it's good to hear from others especially from those who are using them day-by-day. What is the best to design my first Lefthand to work with our network environment without killing your network?
Also I am thinking to reconfigure the network on the second Lefthand (the one the consultant set up for us), what are the steps required to reconfigure the Lefthand? Also there are about 8 LUNs on the Lefthand which is presented to the Xen server? How I am going to represent these LUNs back to the Xen Server


need to design the storage for both the Citrix Xen server but I have

we have about 10 VMs running on Xen Serve, and I am cutting individual luns on the Lefthand and present it to the VMs on the Xen Server.

We have second HP Blade C3000 with attached storage and we are using this storage to install the VMs .

So I would like to know your ideas and as always it's good to hear from others especially from those who are using them day-by-day.

I want to use the Lefthand for both blades and Xen server, what is the best way to manage the VMs on Lefthand?

Do you cut individual Luns for each VM? or do you create one Luns for the all VMs on each blade?

I want utilize the LeftHand with Xen Server, I am thinking to use a Lefthand and create big lun and present that lun to both Xen Server, and use it as pool, because I want do Xen motion between the blades.

Regards,
Hevary

[Steven Clementi]

It sounds to me like you were sold a bunch of stuff... and perhaps the reseller (if there was one involved) did not help with the design aspect of your environment. (or tried, but not really too hard.)

Either way, we're here to help.

First off, what you've heard about keeping your iSCSI traffic on a separate LAN is absolutely true. This does not necessarily mean it needs to be a separate physical LAN, but your existing environment and your goals are going to help determine how to implement things "properly".

Without knowing how the different devices are currently interconnected, I can only guess that perhaps there are some mis-configurations somewhere.

Theoretically, you should be able to access the Lefthand nodes from both c3000 enclosures and all the P4300 nodes should be able to see each other.

Is all of this hardware in a single site?

Can you supply a networking diagram of how things are connected?

You mentioned you can not present storage to other physical servers? If you have an additional network interface on those servers, you can connect it to the iSCSI LAN to get access to storage.

If you don't have an additional network interface.... can you put one in? That would be the best option so you can be "on" the iSCSI network.

Lets start here and see where we get.


Steven

[Shevary]

Hi Stephen,

Thank you very much I will explain our network environment in more details in my next reply

Regards,
Sarhang

[Shevary]

Is all of this hardware in a single site?

No site A in City A and site B in City B.
Site A is connected to site B via multipoint WAN VLAN for data.

You mentioned you canâ t present storage to other physical servers? If you have an additional network interface on those servers, you can connect it to the iSCSI LAN to get access to storage

The Lefthand is connected to the Windows server 2003, so the Win 2003 has 2 interfaces one on 172.16.X.X and 192.168.X.X, and the Lefthand is connected to the Flex 10 with C3000, so the other servers on LAN wonâ t be able to get to the Lefthand because the 172.16.X.X is not routable by anyone on your LAN

Her is my environment:

Side A (Production) we have 2 blades:

Blade 1:
C3000 + Flex 10 + Blade 490c G6
IP address for Xen Server 192.168.X.X
Storage: local attach storage

Blade 2:
C3000 + Blade 490c G6
IP address for Xen Server 192.168.X.X
Storage: Lefthand P4300 with one cluster (2 nodes)
Lefthand IP address 172.16.x.x

Side A, first blade has attached storage with Xen server 5.5, so all the VMs are installed on the local attached storage. Xen server 5.5 is running on second blade and I use the Lefthand for the VMs so I cut the LUNs for each individual VMs and present it to VMs on the second blade. So the Lefthand is visible only to the first Blade and not to the second blade, this is stopping us to do Xen motion all the features come with Xen server.

I am thinking to introduce a new subnet Lefthand with VLAN and put Xen server on LAN subnet with VLAN, so I have the following question:

If I change the existing IP address on Lefthand, what will happen do the existing LUNs which are used by VMs on the Xen server? Because the VMs are booting from the LUNs

I want to be able to create a pool and start moving the VMs from one Blade into another Blade? I canâ t move the VMs on the first blade into the second blade because both blades have the different storage and I canâ t use the Lefthand because the Lefthand is only present it to the second blade.

Side B (Not in Production)
It is not in the production yet, I want design this first

Regards,
Sarhang