how do disks get added and counted in HP StoreVirtual??

[Tom Lyczko]

I am trying to plan increasing the storage contained within our two HP DL380s running HP StoreVirtual VSA.

Presently 11 600GB SAS 15k disks per server in NR10 over two servers result in about 4TB storage (IIRC) divided into two (2) VMware datastores of about 2TB apiece.

If I remove four (4) 600GB disks and replace them with, say, four 2TB SATA drives and set up two RAID arrays, one for each type of disk, would StoreVirtual then combine the two physical arrays into one StoreVirtual volume per server that could become either one (1) or two (2) VMware datastores??

And could I then turn on the tiering Adaptive Optimization??

And how do I estimate how much the storage would be?? I think it would be approximately 10TB raw which would work out to around 5TB per server??

Thank you, Tom

[Mukesh2]

Hi Tom,

Apologies for the delay in response.

Based on the description shared by you here is the response to your request :

Before you perform this activity, please take a back up of data as depending on the raid you have configured for these logical drives on the hosts removing multiple drives may lead to loss of data or broken raid.
The suggested activity should be performed on each host at a time.

1) Schedule a downtime & Move all the vms from host 1 to another one.
2) VSA 1 should be taken in repair mode. (This activity has to be precisely performed by HPE Support)
3) Remove the disks attached to VSA 1.
4) Take a back up of data and then remove the old drives with new drives you wish to on the host.
5) Reconfigure the raids with new set of drives including the one drives were removed from.
6) Re attach the disks to VSA1 and then reconfigure raid on VSA1.
7) Add the VSA to existing MG and then exchange it with the ghost ip showing in Cluster. (This activity should be precisely peformed by HPE Support)
8) Once the VSA is exchanged the volumes will start restriping and we will need to wait until the activity is finished and status restores to normal.
9) Post volumes showing as normal steps (1-8) need to performed for second host.

This change would approximately have a raw capacity of more than 10 TB :

11 - 4 = 7 * 600 GB = 4200 GB
4* 2TB = 8 TB

Total Raw Space = More than approx 10 TB

Hence each server will have approx raw space of more than 5 TB.

Now speaking about Adaptive Optimization, its available with licenses of VSA with capacity of 10 TB and 50 TB.

This option can be enabled only when deploy a new VSA as it gives you a check intially to enable it.

Using tiering for SATA and SAS drives may not yield and effective performance as its works well with SSD and SAS infrastructure.

You can always log a new support request for assistance on activities that involve support frm HPE.

Regards,
Mukesh

[Tom Lyczko]

Hello and thank you for replying, I appreciate that you gave information about swapping out/in the disks, it is the best explanation I have found so far.

I will definitely create a case for this when things are in place for this to proceed forward.

Thank you!!