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P4300 G2 with 2 x DL385 G7s running Hyper-V

 
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ECCL
Occasional Advisor

P4300 G2 with 2 x DL385 G7s running Hyper-V

Hi,

 

Can anyone point me in the right direction with the above? I'm trying to find documentation on how to setup a P4300 with Hyper V but can't seem to find any. All I want to achieve is failover using CSV.

 

Thanks,

8 REPLIES 8
Bart_Heungens
Honored Contributor

Re: P4300 G2 with 2 x DL385 G7s running Hyper-V

Hi,

 

The setup of the P4300 boxes as such is nothing different than setting them up for another OS...

On the Hyper-V servers be sure to install the DSM for the P4xxx series, create volumes and attach them to all the Hyper-V servers... That shared volume across all Hyper-V servers can be configured then as CSV volume...

 

The same like you should do with another type of SAN...

 

Kr,

Bart

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Fred Blum
Valued Contributor
Solution

Re: P4300 G2 with 2 x DL385 G7s running Hyper-V

Old post don't know if you managed.

 

Best Practise Network configuration for the SAN is NIC jumbo frames, flow control and ALB on bonded NICs. Needs corresponding configuration of your switch with enabling jumbo, flow control and RSPT and setting jumbo, flow control on server nics attached to the SAN Subnet. http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01750150.pdf
With ALB you get 2GB Tx and 1Gb Rx. In the HP NCU it is now called TLB, transmit load balancing.

On the P4000 SAN you need to enable a Virtual IP adress and load balancing.

On the server node you set the individual NICs as iSCSI (no bonds), with IP adresses, ALB and Jumbo frames, to see both NICs engaging in SAN traffic you need to set the MPIO setting in iSCSI initiator: TAB Targets, click devices, click MPIO, set load balancing from "Vendor specific" to "Round robin". You will see a passive failover connection changing to active. Click OK, Click OK, check the NICs traffic.

If you get and error like "Not Supported" in MPIO, you've a misconfiguration, for steps see: http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1459582

 

Fred

ECCL
Occasional Advisor

Re: P4300 G2 with 2 x DL385 G7s running Hyper-V

Thanks Fred, some great info there!

WayneH
New Member

Re: P4300 G2 with 2 x DL385 G7s running Hyper-V

We have a very simliar setup running in our production environment, only difference is, we have 4500's. If you have any specific questions I can probably answer them.

IainS
Frequent Advisor

Re: P4300 G2 with 2 x DL385 G7s running Hyper-V

That's the first time I've seen the MPIO settings accessed from the "Devices..." button mentioned before. I've just done some testing and was excited to finally see both NICs working at once, which I have not seen before with the HP DSM installed. However I seem to be seeing slightly higher read throughput and slightly lower write throughput. Is this to be expected? I was sort of hoping I'd get close to maxing out both NICs and unfortunately I'm not seeing that.

 

However this does seem to be a one way option - once you choose "Round Robin" there seems to be no way back to "Vendor Specific".

 

So is this a good thing to do or not? Am I losing some of the intelligence the HP DSM offers by doing this, or just getting potentially better thoughput?

 

One of the major disappointments I've experienced with the P4300s is that they don't appear to use more than one NIC at a time from a Hyper V server. This is something that the Equallogics apparently do rather well leading me to suffer from a case of product envy and perhaps thinking I've chosen the wrong product.

Bart_Heungens
Honored Contributor

Re: P4300 G2 with 2 x DL385 G7s running Hyper-V

Hi,

 

If U want to use the MPIO from the MS iSCSI initiator and set it to Round Robin, indeed all I/O will be split accross the 2 NIC.s... And that's it. Personally I do not like the no way back, that is why I never use it...

 

I used always the HP DSM MPIO which gives U the additional functionallity that every server will make an active iSCSI connection to all P4x00 modules... This is something that Equalogic does not do... With only 2 nodes in the cluster, the performance gain is not that much but I did tests with 4 modules and higher and there U can see a lot of difference...

 

In my case I saw trafic on both NICs in the server and saw also 2 times the amount of storage nodes on active iSCSI connections on the P4x00 CMC mgmt console... Can easily be simulated...

 

 

Kr,

Bart

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IainS
Frequent Advisor

Re: P4300 G2 with 2 x DL385 G7s running Hyper-V

Thanks for the response Bart.

 

I have been using the HP DSM because from testing I saw better performance particularly for random i/o even though it was limited to using only 1 NIC.

 

However I just got the HP P4000 DSM for MPIO Deployment Guide for SAN/iQ 9 and see that it does indeed suggest using round robin to get active/active. I had upgraded to 9 but had not checked the docs to see how this worked! I thought it was supposed to be added in 9 but had not found it to do anything. Obivously I missed this step since I didn't review the updated documentation.

 

Now all I need is some sort of support for storage tiering and I will be very happy. Actually just read another document and see there is a degree of support for storage tiering. It's not intelligently sharing volumes over different types of P4000 nodes but it does seem to allow for live migration. Great!

 

 

Bart_Heungens
Honored Contributor

Re: P4300 G2 with 2 x DL385 G7s running Hyper-V

Hi,

 

Tiering is indeed possible, maybe not automatically like some people prefer... If you have created multiple clusters with SATA nodes and SAS nodes, U can move volumes from one cluster to the other...

 

 

Kr,

Bart

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