P4300G2 Simple Redundant setup

[Julian Underwood]

Hi there,

I have a pair of P4300 G2's which I am looking to setup in a redundant configuration which I will be accessing with a pair of servers running VMware. I'm trying to avoid over-complication here.

My goal is to simply make this single site's storage fault tolerant. If one of the storage chassis goes down, I'd like the SAN to continue to serve up the storage for the VMware VM's.

Regarding the P4300's, can I simply:
- Bond the network interfaces on each unit.
- Setup clustering network RAID 1+0 between the two units.

Am I done? Do I need to mess around with setting up a FOM?

Also, I have some HP 2910al switches, does anyone know if flow control is on by default and if it's not, if it would hurt anything to enable it later on after a network bond.

Thank you!

[Sudhakar Subramaniam]

Hi Julian,

the below document will help you in setup.

http://bizsupport2.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01744737/c01744737.pdf

In case you need more information about other things you can always refer

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DocumentIndex.jsp?contentType=SupportManual〈=en&cc=us&docIndexId=64179&taskId=101&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=3936136#5

[Julian Underwood]

Thanks for that. It doesn't seem ideal to me to have a dedicated host to run the Failover Manager--is there another way to achieve storage failover/load balancing between the two P4300's?

I would think by clustering the two boxes it would make it appear as a single data pool. If one unit goes down, the storage is still available to VMware.

What am I missing here? Why is this added Failover Manager required? Sounds like a single point of failure.

[Sudhakar Subramaniam]

in the second link you can check the multisite san user module which will give you more idea about failover manager

[Dirk Trilsbeek]

All storage cluster systems need a quorum to avoid split brain situations. The FOM is the quorum for SANiQ.

[Mark...]

Hi,
You can use a virtual manager (VM) to act as the tie break to maintain quorum as well.
****HOWEVER**** the VM requires manual intervention to enable (start/stop) it so you will lose quorum - and so all data/disk **ACCESS** - till you regain quorum.
Mark...

[Paul Hutchings]

If you only have a single site, run a FOM as a VM on one of your vsphere hosts but make sure you're running it from local storage not from on the P4000.

The 2910's don't have flow control on by default, you need to enable it per port.

You also need to enable it per nic on each P4000 node before you create the NIC bond.