P4000 / Lefthand – v9.5 feature list

The 9.5 release is a comprehensive release that includes enhancements in the following areas:
  • Application managed snapshots for VMware ESX Server and Microsoft Hyper-V Server
  • SAN Status Home Page — the SAN Status home page is the new home page for the CMC and presents key information for all management groups in the storage environment in a single view.
  • Zero to VSA automated installation and deployment — Single installer can install VSA, FOM and CMC. Go from “zero” to a fully functional virtual SAN in just a few easy steps. Scriptable install tool allows ROBO customers to script install once and deploy VSA quickly at multiple remote locations.
  • Peer Motion data mobility with cluster swap — Cluster swap allows users to replace or upgrade P4000 clusters. Edit cluster menu guides decisions about adding, removing, or exchanging storage systems. Easily migrate data online between tiers.
  • Remote Copy performance improvements — Improvements to remote copy times, the time required to scan volumes, ability to support more frequent snapshots, reduction of RPOs for DR solutions.
  • Storage Replication Adapter for Vsphere Site Recovery Manager 5.x — Supports automated failback and is included on the HP P4000 Application Integration Solution Pack
  • Best Practice configuration wizards — Configuration wizards guide towards highest availability configurations: add Failover Manager for 2–node configuration, configure disk RAID 6 for single-node configurations, recommends volume replication when expanding clusters to more than one storage system

P4000 / Lefthand and Windows DSM (MPIO)

Steps to setup MPIO round robin and DSM with P4000 / Lefthand nodes

This example is windows 2008 with 2 x 1gbit nics

  1. Install HP DSM driver onto windows 2008  (this should also install MPIO feature on windows 2008)
  2. Setup 2 x IP’s on windows host – storage subnet (used with MPIO)
    1. Confirm you can ping target from both (enable one at a time – ensure there is no routing on your other nics)
  3. Provision storage and allow server read / write access to windows server (via initiator name)
  4. Open iSCSI on windows 2008
  5. Put in IP of target in discovery tab
  6. On first tab confirm that iSCSI drive is presented to host
  7. Click “connect” – check both auto-connect and use MPIO
    1. click advanced – chose MS iSCSI initiator, choose first IP and target IP. Click o.k. / o.k
    2. click advanced – chose MS iSCSI initiator, choose second IP and target IP. Click o.k. / o.k
    3. Repeat above per additional Nic
  8. Confirm via “devices” that there is x (as many targets as nics) targets per disk
    1. Within devices choose MPIO – change from vendor specific to “round robin”
      1. Note : read / write access to LUN is required when using “round robin” MPIO opposed to the default “vendor specific” which works with read only access. Else you will get an error – “not supported”
    2. Repeat above per “device”
  9. Confirm on Lefthand / P4000 CMC that the LUN has one connection per initiator Nic, and that each connection also has its DSM children (visible in CMC if working).

Confirm that the connection are as expected…

Run some disk benchmark utilities (iometer) and check that traffic is travelling over all the nics you have setup above. You can just use windows builtin task manager to do this.

Check that the right amount of connections are on the CMC for that particular LUN and initiator.  So if you had 3 nodes via 2 initiator nics you would actually have 8 active connections in total (1 per nic (2) and an additional for every nic to each nodes (6))

Note : There are some reported issues with DMS and data corruption. Although i have not seen this myself please be diligent when it comes to data backup esp when production data is involved.

vSphere and Multipathing iSCSI

This is just a quick reference to create a multiplathing iSCSI setup…

Create two virtual kernel switches, one called “iSCSI-1” and the other called “iSCSI-2” (and so on if you have more nics)

Then per kernel portgroup ensure that only one of the nics is active. For the “iSCSI-1” portgroup configure it to override the virtual switch settings and move nic 0 to active and nic 1 to unused. For the “iSCSI-2” portgroup configure it to override the virtual switch settings and move nic 1 to active and nic 0 to unused.

Now you have to run some esxcli commands to gel things together…. alt-f1 on the esxi console and type “unsupported” followed by your root password. The following is the command i have to run to get both my portgroups to work together on the iscsi hba….  (you can check your vmk number from the networking config screen)

esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk1 -d vmhba33
esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk2 -d vmhba33

For each target then change the path selection method to “round-robin”.

Go back to storage adapters and click “rescan”

If you want all future iSCSI targets to automatically use round-robin you must also run the following from commandline…   (this is for our HP Lefthand, your “storage array type” may be different. Its listed under your target details). Basically sets round robin as a default for this type of array. In general you should do this first before presenting any LUNs etc, else you may have to bounce your box.

esxcli nmp satp setdefaultpsp –satp VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA –psp VMW_PSP_RR

Update : Hardware iSCSI nics

The process for hardware iSCSI initiators is similar to above, but you assign a single kernel port per nic. To find which nic belongs to which iSCSI initiator you must run this command from the CLI;

esxcli swiscsi vmnic list -d vmhba#

vmhba# is the name of the iSCSI adapter.