Enquiry about Storage Array Configuration

[kashifali2007]

Dear Team 

we have bought HPE MSA 2062 Storage, and 6 units of HPE MSA 1.92TB SAS SSD 12Gb/Sec. Now before starting configuration i would like to know the best practices to configures the MSA 2062, i have few questions as below, would you please answer me to clarify my concepts as i am newbie to this MSA Configuration.

1. What is the role of Pool in the MSA2062, does Pool A belong to Controler A and Pool B belong to Contoller B or pools are independeant of contollers.
2. is it mandatory to add disks in both Pools or only one pool can be used, if we add all disks to only 1 pool then if contoller A fail (due to any reason) then does Contoller B will take charge to provide data to hosts or no
3. We have 6 units of 1.92TB SAS SSD, so in thise case which RAID level best for us.
4. what are the benefits of adding disk in both pools

Best Regards

[Sahana_S]

Hi @kashifali2007 ,

If the owning controller fails, the partner controller assumes temporary ownership of the pool and resources owned by
the failed controller. If the host fault-tolerant cabling configuration, with appropriate mapping, is used to connect the
controllers to hosts, LUNs for both controllers are accessible through the partner controller, so I/O to volumes can
continue without interruption.

MSA DP+ is the best RAID level to use.

Please refer to the below documents for complete information on MSA 2062 storage installation.

Document links:

Installation guide: https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docLocale=en_US&docId=a00128579en_us

Storage Array overview:- https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docLocale=en_US&docId=a00106492en_us

Thank you.

I hope you find this information useful!!

[support_s]

System recommended content:

1. HPE MSA 1060/2060/2062 Storage Arrays Best Practices

2. HPE MSA 2062 Storage Array - Overview

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[JonPaul · Accepted solution]

@kashifali2007 
1. What is the role of a Pool?
The Pool is the physical storage for the volumes created.  You are on the right track with the ownership. Pool A is owned by controller A and Pool B is owned by controller B.  Controllers are in constant communication with each other and will take over the storage resources (drives, disk-groups, Pool) in the event one controller goes offline.
2. One Pool or 2?
You can have either.  In a single Pool configuration the controllers will act similar to ACTIVE-PASSIVE. There is another thread in this forum with information: https://community.hpe.com/t5/msa-storage/single-pool-with-msa-dp-or-two-pools-with-raid5-or-6/td-p/7160123
3.  6x 1.92TB SSDs, which RAID?
There are a few ways to go with this one.  Unfortunately you can not use MSA-DP+ as that requires a minimum of 12 drives.  The options all relate to your level of tolerance for degraded state vs usuable space vs future.
Default: the MSA will default to using RAID 6 (4+2), this will allow up to 2 simultaneous drive faults without data loss.  With 6 drives it also puts you in a Power of 2 number of data drives but it uses 2 full drives for parity
RAID 5 (4+1) + Spare:  Same capacity as RAID 6,  pretty much the same performance (see quickspecs), Power of 2
RAID 5 (5+1):  Increase capacity by 1 drive.  No spares for rebuild, non-Power of 2
RAID 10:  Lowest capacity, survive up to 3 drive faults (if they are the right drives), slight write performance improvement
In general you don't have to worry about performance with an all SSD configuration. They are so fast they compensate for the power of 2 limitation and RAID differences.  So then it is down to usable space and future considerations.  If you build a big disk-group but not MSA-DP+ then best practice is to expand to add another identical big disk-group this can be costly for a desired incremental increase.
Also SSDs not having moving parts tend to have fewer problems and fewer replacements.  But do have a specific endurance which will cause them to end all at the same time.  The Virtual Storage technical guide has a portion about SSD endurance you should review.
Look at:
MSA Best Practices:  https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a00105260enw
MSA Virtual Storage Guide:  https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a00103247enw
4. Benefits to using both Pools?
First is you can separate your workloads.  If you wanted an SSD workload and an HDD workload this is the only way to guarantee that volumes intended for SSD did not have data on HDD and vice versa. Not an issue in your case.
Second the 2 pools could give you more performance as a single Pool/controller is bottlenecked at a certain point.  Again not a big concern with the number of drives you have.
Hope this helps,  the 3 references above should have some more detail.
Also use the MSA HealthCheck to review best practices and keep up with firmware releases:  https://www.hpe.com/storage/MSAHealthCheck