HP storage old products for virtualization

[Miguel Angel Alvarez Ro]

Hello
I'm totally newbie to HP storage products, and my SAN storage knowledge is limited. I'm trying to build a storage system using low cost HP reconditioned equipment. My goal is to setup a Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization cluster for a total of seven virtual servers that will be used by about 20 users. We also want to use this system for storage management testing and training purposes. The problem is that I am a bit confused about the different storage products that HP has offered in the recent past. I wonder major conceptual differences (without going into technical details) of products such as HP MSA2000, HP MSA2012, HP MSA2313, HP P2000 G3, HP EVA 4400, HP EVA 8100 ...
The most important questions that I need to solve:
1) What of all these products is the cheapest to suit our needs?
2) Are all these products valid for SAN or some of them can only be used as DAS?
3) In the HP virtualization world is there any difference between using a DAS system or a SAN system with SAS connections?
Our system initial requirements are:
- Double controller.
- SAN Connection Protocol: SAS, iSCSI (1 GB) or a mixture of both.
- Disk types supported: SAS, Nearline-SAS or SATA (not requeire SAS-II or SATA-III).
- Maximum of 4 host Hyper-V virtualization.
- Microsoft CSVs (Cluster Shared Volume) support.
- Snapshoots.
Any suggestion about these requieremnts will be also wellcome.
Thanks in advance.

[Torsten.]

HP MSA2000, HP MSA2012, HP MSA2313, HP P2000 G3 are the generations (G1...G3) of the MSA2000, renamed to P2000 in the past. They can have FC, iSCSI or SAS connectivity, depending on model and generation.
Since the older EVAs (now P6000) have FC or FATA disk drives, you don't want to have them? I think you can have used model for a good price meanwhile. If you want to have iSCSI only, you can also have a look at a P4000 cluster. Search for "product+quickspecs" for much more information, e.g. MSA2000 quickspecs.

[Miguel Angel Alvarez Ro]

Thanks for your answer. I've been reading P4300 technnical specifications.  What I have understand is that instead of having a double controller what you need to do with this product is to setup a two, or more, P4300 node cluster to get high storage availability . Is that right?

I've been also looking for some quotes and you were right: buying to P4300 nodes is cheaper than buying an MSA2000 or a P2000 with dual controller, and as long as the two P4300 node solution gives more HA than a one only system with dual controller the question is do I need something else than the two P4300 nodes to get this working? Why this aparently better solution is cheaper than the others?

Thanks again.