Storevirtual 4330 SANS and VmWare

[LukeAUS]

Hi,

Just hoping I can please get some assistance with 2 x Storevirtual 4330 SANS I have been asked to configure and setup.

We have VVMware 5.5 installed on 3 HP DL 380 servers here and the plan was to install 2 sans and Vmotion for disaster recovery purposes.

A backup server room has been setup with 1 x HP StoreVirtual 4330 SAN and 1 x HP DL 380 server

The server room has 1 x HP StoreVirtual 4330 SAN and 2 x HP DL 380 servers

The plan was to have all VM’s running on the 2 x HP DL 380's in the server room connected to the 1 x StoreVirtual 4330 SAN.

Then use the 1 x HP DL 380 in the backup server room if one of the Hosts Fail. SAN2 (backup server room) would be a live backup of SAN 1 (server room) if it was to fail

I have done the DOA checks, and set them up accordingly (Installed Fibre cards, setup IP addresses, hostname etc) and racked them, but I have been a little overwhelmed with the amount of information avaialble and I am not too sure what I am doing.

Do i need to use a VSA? How to I get Multipathing working? Will there be a problem with plugging the Fibre ports into a Cisco Catalyst GBIC port?How to I connet the SAN to Vmware? please help!!!

Any assistance would be greatly apppreciated!

[a_o · Accepted solution]

First, lets' take a big picture view. The first thing to note is that what StoreVirtual brings to the table is the concept of Network RAID.  Otherwise you might as well have gone with a traditional FC/iSCSI storage solution. Ideally in StoreVirtual, your targets are clustered, and the data is synchronously replicated between two or more P4xx0 nodes.

Basically, it boils down to  when you create a LUN in StoreVirtual, your LUN exists on two or more nodes. The main benefit of this is that depending on your chosen Network RAID mode,  your LUNs are protected if one or more of your P4330 goes down.  There are other benefits, but I won't go into them here.

There are a plethora of HA and  DR solutions on different platforms that StoreVirtual storage can be a part of.

As you seem to have chosen VMWare, you seemingly have a workable solution.
It also seems that you've chosen FC as your connectivity, but StoreVirtual can also work using iSCSI.

To answer the basic gist of your question,  You need to configure the StoreVirtual units, setup StoreVirtual Management Groups, StoreVirtual Clusters, and StoreVirtual LUNs, and then present them to your VMware cluster.

You need to do a lot more reading to fully understand the differrent deployment options available so that you may choose the correct one for your HA/DR needs.

Start by looking at the following:

https://www.google.com/search?q=storevirtual+vmware+best+practices&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

[LukeAUS]

Thank you, I appreciate you taking the time to help me!