HP P6000 Enterprise Virtual Array for VMwareTechnical brief

Table of contentsExecutive summary............................................................................................................................... 2 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 3 Technology overview ........................................................................................................................... 4 Thin provisioning ............................................................................................................................. 4 LUN migration ................................................................................................................................. 7 FC, iSCSI, and FCoE ........................................................................................................................ 7 Performance .................................................................................................................................... 8 P6000 EVA with VMware..................................................................................................................... 9 HP Insight Control Storage Module for vCenter .................................................................................... 9 HP P6000 EVA Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) compliance .................................................... 10 vSphere 4 ALUA compliance ........................................................................................................... 10 LUN follow-over ............................................................................................................................. 10 Other configuration considerations................................................................................................... 11 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 12 Resources ......................................................................................................................................... 13

Executive summaryThe HP P6000 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) family is an enterprise-class storage array system designed to aggregate and automate array management tasks to manage more storage capacity with fewer resources. The HP P6000 EVA family consists of the HP P6300 EVA and HP P6500 EVA and is designed for the enterprise market. Whats more, it is ideal for many mid-range and enterprise applications across a variety of industries. The P6000 EVA provides high performance and high availability that is easy to use and economical to own. The P6000 EVA systems save time, space, and cost compared to traditionally architected storage. They are supported by a powerful, yet simple suite of management software that makes it easy for users to provision storage and achieve the improved levels of productivity.

Figure 1: HP P6300 EVA and P6500 EVAs 1

P6300 LFF

P6300 SFF

P6500 LFF

P6500 SFF

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LFF refers to large form factor drives; SFF refers to small form factor drives.

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IntroductionThe HP P6000 EVA systems are the next generation of the HP EVA product line. The P6000 EVA systems offer fast, 8 Gb Fibre Channel host connectivity, 6 Gb SAS backend bandwidth, dynamic LUN migration functionality, and thin provisioning for improved storage utilization, scalability, and ease of capacity planning. The P6000 EVA automatically improves performance by placing data across more disk drives than a conventional array. Ease of management is enabled through the HP P6000 EVA Command View Software, resulting in less time on maintenance and administrative tasks. The product offering includes both local and remote replication, volume snap and clone functionality, and cluster integrated solution software. New dynamic LUN/RAID migration functionality is also available with the P6000 EVA. This new feature enables customers to migrate data according to their business needs, with no application interruption. With a simple one-step process, customers can change existing LUN characteristics such as size, RAID level, and the type of disk used, to achieve enhanced performance and capacity adaptability. New thin provisioning software, which is included with P6000 Command View, helps lower capacity requirements and therefore lowers costs, allowing customers to present applications with more capacity than is physically allocated to them in the array. All of these important features and solution offerings are combined in the P6000 EVA to help align your VMware vSphere infrastructure with your IT requirements to meet your current and future business demands. This technical brief provides an overview of the new features that are part of the HP P6000 EVA and how they integrate with VMware vSphere infrastructure. Table 1: Selected features of the HP P6000 EVA for VMware vSphere 2Feature HP P6000 EVA Controller options Description The P6000 EVA arrays may be ordered in various configurations and offer flexibility and choice for your solution storage environment. The following controller connectivity options are available: HP P6000 Cluster Extension HP P6000 Thin Provisioning 8 FC host ports 4 FC host ports and 8 1 Gb iSCSI host ports 4 FC host ports and 4 10 Gb iSCSI/FCoE host ports

HP P6000 Cluster Extension provides hands-free failover/failback decision-making as it detects failures and automatically manages recovery without human intervention. Thin provisioning reduces the amount of over-allocated storage capacity and helps eliminate the cost of stranded or unused capacity. Thin provisioning reduces power, cooling, and floor space for immediate cost savings. Dynamic LUN/RAID Migration allows customers to change the characteristics of an existing LUN, such as RAID type, disk type, and LUN size with active host I/O. Just like small LUNs with support for shrink, expand, snapshot, and empty container Industry-leading SFF (2.5) 6 Gbps drives are space and power efficient. Consuming less than 50 percent power than 3.5 Large Form Factor (LFF) disks, SFF devices enable higher storage densities and greater return on investment. Industry-leading LFF (3.5) 15K rpm 6 Gbps drives provide the highest performance on a drive by drive basis. Industry-leading user interface has proven over time to be powerful and intuitive, reducing setup and maintenance time significantly.

Dynamic LUN/RAID Migration Large LUN support (32 TB) Small Form Factor (SFF) devices

Large Form Factor (LFF) devices Easy to use GUI interface

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Refer to the HP P6000 EVA and P6000 Software QuickSpecs found at http://www.hp.com/go/P6000 for latest information

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Technology overviewThin provisioningHP P6000 Thin Provisioning allows administrators to manage more capacity with much less effort, and reduce costs by not over-allocating capacity. To cite an example: the future capacity of a VMware data store can be allocated today, with just todays required capacity of physical disks actually installed. HP P6000 Thin Provisioning allows users to increase physical disk capacity, as needed, at a later time, without affecting the data store. Thin provisioning helps reduce the cost of ownership by removing the requirement to purchase and allocate capacity up front, as well as reduce the cost of power, cooling, maintenance, and floor space for storage that is not actively being used (and might never be used). Without thin provisioning, it is common to over-allocate storage capacity by 75 percent or more in order to avoid future service interruptions. Figure 2 provides a pictorial example of traditional storage allocation compared to thin provisioned storage allocation. Thin provisioning requires lesser capacity and provides the same benefits as traditional provisioning. The difference between the actual usage and the allocated capacity illustrates the reduced cost and increased return on investment provided by thin provisioning.

Figure 2: Traditional wasted capacity vs. P6000 Thin Provisioning space efficiency

With P6000 Thin Provisioning the anticipated capacity for the life of the VMware environment should be provisioned initially and then additional disk capacity can be easily added, based on your business requirements. An SNMP or email alerts can be configured to notify the administrator when the Vdisk reaches a preconfigured threshold. By adding capacity only when it is needed you reduce power and cooling requirements and reduce wasted or stranded capacity. To use thin provisioning effectively, array capacity scaling is based on both performance and capacity needs. As an example, assume that the VMware infrastructure performance requirements can be satisfied with only 230 SFF 15K rpm SAS disks; however, anticipated disk capacity utilization 24 months from the time of initial assessment may be 300 disks. This is no problem. Configure the array with the number of disks needed to meet the short-term known needs, but provision the capacity based on the expected need over the life of the environment. Then, as usage increases over time, additional disks can be added (usually at a reduced future cost). Its that simple. No complicated planning or stress.

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Consult the HP P6000 EVA user guide and available white papers to learn more about sizing the P6000 EVA to take full advantage of thin provisioning capabilities, while achieving database performance goals, driving down cost of ownership, and reducing stranded/unused storage. In summary, here are some benefits of thin provisioning: Purchase only the storage capacity and performance actually needed today Take advantage of ongoing storage price reductions by delaying purchases until capacity is needed Save power and cooling costs immediately Reduce stress by reducing the need to anticipate and justify expenses for resources that might never be needed Increase array capacity online, without any impact to the server/application Increase storage utilization and return on investment immediately (stop paying for storage that may never get used) Use virtual storage with your virtual machines Never extend a File System (FS) againmake the Vdisk larger than needed the first time Easily shrink the thin provisioned Vdisk HP P6000 EVA Thin Provisioned storage has implementation benefits as shown in Figure 3 and described here: Based on performance, capacity, and business requirements, the actual pool of storage capacity (middle stair step graph area) is shown in comparison to the used capacity (lower graph area) and the virtual provisioned capacity (top line in graph). The upper area in the graph is virtual capacity with no associated storage costs (no power, cooling, and floor space costs). The virtual thin provisioned capacity (top line in graph) should be large enough so the server File System never needs to be changed. As actual capacity or performance needs increase (lower graph area), additional storage may be added online (middle stair step graph area), without impact to the VMware ESX server environment. The difference between the actual capacity and the provisioned virtual capacity correlates directly to increased return on investment.

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Figure 3: Example showing the benefits of thin provisioned virtual storage over time (upper area in table indicates all virtual capacity with no associated storage costs resulting in significant savings)

Considerations when using thin provisioning with VMware VMware includes its own thin provisioning mechanism which works well with array-based thin provisioning. VMware also offers an intuitive GUI for configuring and converting virtual machine disks (VMDK) for thin provisioning. VMware has the ability to dynamically grow virtual machine file system (VMFS) volumes without using extents. VMDK thin provisioning is a great way to efficiently use the VMFS data store without trapping capacity to a virtual machine that isnt using all of it. The HP P6300 EVA and P6500 EVA also enable thin provisioning by presenting thin provisioned Vdisks from a disk group. Both VMware Thin Provisioning and HP P6000 EVA Thin Provisioning can be used together for optimal capacity usage. The following are reasons to use vSphere Thin Provisioning with HP P6000 EVA Thin Provisioning: Use vSphere thin provisioning to efficiently use VMFS space and use HP P6000 EVA Thin Provisioning for the thin provisioning pool performance benefits and capacity manageability benefits without over-allocating the HP P6000 EVA Thin Provisioning pool capacity. Use vSphere thin provisioning and HP P6000 EVA Thin Provisioning to gain the advantage of allocating storage to achieve higher levels of storage efficiency.

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LUN migrationThe HP P6000 Dynamic LUN/RAID Migration feature provides the ability to change the characteristics of an existing LUN. This new feature for the P6000 EVA addresses the following situations: Performance needs increased after your LUN had been set up The application no longer requires RAID 1 performance levels Business requirements demand a change in redundancy level for data availability New, faster drives are available, and are added to the array in a separate disk group New, larger capacity drives are available to store data that is no longer frequently accessed This is no problem with the new P6000 Dynamic LUN/RAID Capacity Management functionality for fully-allocated LUNs. The P6000 EVA now offers online LUN and RAID migration, which provides the following benefits to VMware environments:Ease of use No downtime Strategic use Storage management continues to be straightforward, reducing risks associated with operator error. Migration on the EVA causes no interruption in service. IT can improve its support of business processes with no downtime. Data can be assigned to the right storage tier. If analysis shows data should be moved to larger-capacity, lower-cost storage, then make you can make it so. If you need faster devices or a different RAID level, or both, this can also be achieved without any problems. With the ability to use storage strategically and proactively, P6000 EVA storage investments can have a longer, useful life.

Greater return on investment

Migrations may be performed through either a GUI or CLUI interface and in various ways with minimal performance impact. LUNs can be migrated to different RAID levels (Vraid levels 0, 1, 5, or 6) and/or different groups of disks (7.2K, 10K, 15K rpm HDDs are available), while the VMware data store and other storage components remains online. As a use case, departments can tune their environment by migrating data and logs between different drive types and RAID levels and easily discover what environment configuration works best for them. The P6000 Dynamic LUN/RAID migration product offers a powerful option for environment tuning for increased performance.

FC, iSCSI, and FCoEHP extends capabilities of past EVA generations with new, native host protocol optionsiSCSI, and FCoEin addition to the standard Fibre Channel (FC) protocol. These options are available in several hardware configurations for optimal flexibility. The standard configuration consists of 8 Gb FC host port connectivity for typical Storage Area Networks (SANs). For a little more host connect flexibility, the FC/iSCSI controller adds economical IP attach capability to the traditional FC connectivity. The ability to use 1 Gb iSCSI offers an excellent solution for smaller departments and budgets, since it can use existing Ethernet infrastructure. For environments that need flexibility, as well as higher performance, the P6000 EVA provides the FC and 10 Gb iSCSI/FCoE host connect option. The FCoE option allows the use of Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) in the server for converged IP and FCoE data traffic. Benefits of the iSCSI and FCoE interfaces include: LAN convergence for normal and virtual machines Shared Ethernet infrastructure usage Migration between FC and IP/Ethernet environments Migration between Direct Attach Storage (DAS) and iSCSI

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The EVA iSCSI option offers simultaneous iSCSI and Fibre Channel support, providing modular, multi-protocol SAN designs with increased scalability, stability, and storage infrastructure ROI. Fibre Channel SANs based on EVA technology leverage IP networks and extend SAN advantages into smaller departments and remote locations, where budget constraints may not permit an FC SAN. This enables storage consolidation by creating larger SANs extending over longer distances providing access to storage that can be scaled/re-allocated as needed. The EVA iSCSI technology also allows an EVA to be a dedicated iSCSI array, allowing customers to migrate from DAS to an IP SAN by leveraging the existing IP infrastructure without requiring any investment in FC connectivity.

PerformanceWith the new controllers and new 6 Gb SAS interface to the back end disks, the P6000 EVA models provide higher performance than their earlier counterparts. Figure 4 provides a general comparison of the performance gain available with the P6300 and P6500. The P6300/P6500 EVAs benefit VMware environments for both large-block sequential and small-block random access I/O workloads. So whether your environment is primarily composed of business intelligence or online transaction processing workloads, the P6000 EVA solutions will address your business needs. For organizations concerned about power and cooling in their data centers, the P6000 EVA disk arrays utilize space and power efficient 2.5 SFF 6 Gbps drives. These SFF drives consume 50 percent less power than 3.5 LFF drives, enabling higher density and cost savings. The P6000 array family supports mixing form factors (SFF and LFF) and performance levels (high performance and mid-line drives) in the same array. With the new online LUN migration capability vSphere administrators are provided excellent performance tuning options. The P6300 EVA supports up to 250 SFF or up to 120 LFF spindles, compared to 96 LFF drives in the EVA4400. The larger P6500 EVA supports 240 LFF or 450 SFF drives. Its predecessor, the EVA6400, supports 216 LFF spindles. Figure 4 shows relative performance information for the P6000 array.

Figure 4: RAID 1 HP P6000 EVA workload comparisons

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P6000 EVA with VMwareServer virtualization offers many solution options and has been widely adopted in production data centers. Virtualization is transforming the data center due to its benefits in power consumption, reduced data center footprint, IT flexibility, consolidation, availability, and a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). The benefits of virtualization are being extended to the rest of the data center by implementing converged infrastructure. A converged infrastructure improves IT efficiency by providing virtual resource pools that adapt to ever-changing business requirements. HP provides a full range of servers, storage, infrastructure, and software products, so that businesses can take advantage of this data center transformation.

HP Insight Control Storage Module for vCenterHP Insight Control Storage Module for VMwares vSphere management console (vCenter) is a component within the HP Insight Control plug-in for vCenter. It provides VMware administrators who are using vCenter the ability to see how virtual machines are mapped to datastores and individual HP P6000 EVA volumes. By providing these clear relationships between VMs, datastores, and storage the VMware administrators productivity increases, as does the ability to ensure quality of service. Roles for administrators can be defined on an individual basis, providing the ability to apply specific permissions for both view and control functions. The HP Insight Control Storage Module for vCenter supports mixed array environments including P6000, P4000, P2000 (MSA), and the XP array series including the P9500. When deployed with P6000 EVA arrays, the HP Insight Control Storage Module for vCenter, provides the following: Monitors the health and status of the P6000 EVA array Displays LUN/volume connections from VMs and ESX servers to the arrays and provides the location and attributes of the P6000 EVA array within the SAN Identifies what storage features are available to allow administrators to match the features available on P6000 EVA arrays to their requirements Provides a cluster-level view of the storage Enables the creation and expansion of a new Datastore on P6000 EVA storage Facilitates creation of a VM from a template Helps clone a VM Allows deleting Volume HP Insight Control Storage Module for vCenter is downloadable from Software Depot: https://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=HPVPR For more information on HP Insight Control Storage Module for vCenter visit: www.hp.com/go/vmware

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HP P6000 EVA Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) complianceThe HP P6000 EVA family of disk arrays utilizes dual-controller asymmetric active-active controllers and is compliant with the SCSI Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) standard for LUN access/failover and I/O processing. The arrays active-active nature allows I/O requests to be serviced by either one of the two controllers to a LUN. However, the asymmetric access nature of the array forces the optimal path to a LUN through one of the two controllers. An optimal path is defined as an I/O path to the LUN with minimum processing overhead. This capability means that the controller with the optimal path to the LUN, also known as the managing controller, can issue I/O directly to the LUN. Whereas the non-managing controller, also known as the proxy controller, can receive I/O requests for a LUN it does not manage but has to proxy the request to the managing controller for processing to the LUN. The HP P6000 EVA disk arrays support both implicit and explicit ALUA modes. This ability means that the arrays can assign and change the managing controller for the LUN (implicit transition) and also allow a host driver to set or change the LUN controller ownership (explicit transition).

vSphere 4 ALUA complianceVMware vSphere 4 is also ALUA-compliant. This is one of the major features added to the vSphere starting with the version 4 SCSI architecture. vSphere ALUA compliance allows the hypervisor to detect that a storage system is ALUA-capable and to utilize the ALUA compliance to optimize I/O processing to the controllers and detect LUN failover between controllers. vSphere supports all four ALUA modes: Not supported Implicit support Explicit support Both implicit and explicit support (used by an EVA) In vSphere, round robin load balancing is officially supported along with Most Recently Used (MRU) and fixed I/O path policies. It is worth noting that round robin and MRU I/O path policies are ALUA-aware, meaning that both round robin and MRU load balancing will first attempt to schedule I/O requests to a LUN using a path that is through the managing controller. This is a significant enhancement with performance benefits for administrators of an HP P6000 EVA SAN with vSphere.

LUN follow-overAnother important concept that must be understood is LUN follow-over. LUN follow-over goes hand in hand with ALUA. As discussed above, ALUA defines which controller in an asymmetric active-active array is the managing controller for a LUN. LUN follow-over, on the other end, ensures that when the optimal path to the LUN changes that all hosts accessing the LUN will also change their access path to the LUN to reflect this change. LUN follow-over in any vSphere cluster is critical, as it will ensure that thrashing of the LUN between the two array controllers never occurs, and more importantly, it will significantly reduce administrator configuration time. This is because all ESX servers accessing the LUN in question will update the LUN optimal access path to follow when the LUN is implicitly moved from one controller to the other.

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ALUA compliance, beginning with ESX 4, and the support for round robin load balancing were truly a giant leap forward for ESX multi-pathing. These two simple features have eliminated all of the intricate configuration steps administrators carried out with ESX 3.5 and older versions, and also provide a much more balanced system configuration than administrators could achieve through manual preferred path configuration. Additionally, with round robin I/O path policy, I/O can be queued to multiple controller ports on the EVA providing an instant performance boost. Round robin I/O path policy is the recommended setting for HP P6000 EVA active-active arrays. MRU is also suitable if round robin is not desired in the specific environment.

Other configuration considerationsIt is important to note that when configuring vSphere 4 to access HP P6000 EVA disk arrays in the SAN, it is highly recommended to create a redundant SAN environment by leveraging the HP P6000 EVA redundant controllers, using two distinct Fibre Channel SANs and, at a minimum, dual Host Bus Adapters (HBA) in each ESX server. The topology should look similar to figure 5 showing a vSphere 4 server attached to an HP P6500 EVA through a redundant fabric.

Figure 5: vSphere server attached to an HP P6500 EVA through a redundant fabric

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There are several important reasons why the topology shown in figure 5 is ideal. The topology provides increased fault tolerance. The environment is protected against HBA, single fabric, and controller or controller port failures. As discussed earlier, it is always better to access a LUN through the optimal controller for read I/O. Thus in the event of an HBA failure, failover will occur at the HBA but access to the LUN remains on the same controller. For this reason, it is highly recommended that each HBA port in the vSphere server accesses one or more controller ports on each controller. Similarly, a controller failure in this topology will only trigger a controller failover, and not cause an HBA failover, which incurs a longer system recovery time in the event of failures. In a direct connect environment, the same redundancy can be achieved with two more HBA or HBA ports; however, the configuration is slightly different.

ConclusionCustomers demand the highest efficiency and performance in their VMware environment, while keeping costs under control. VMware customers need a storage solution they can count on to increase total resource utilization and productivity, adapt quickly to changing business conditions, protect storage investments and maintain business continuity in the face of unexpected disasters. HP provides a wide selection of reliable storage solutions that address such requirements, including the HP P6000 EVAs. The P6000 EVA family offers high performance, high capacity and high availability to mid-range and enterprise customers. The P6000 EVA meets the high transaction I/O of mission-critical VMware applications and provides easy capacity expansion, instantaneous replication, and simple administration using the P6000 Command View software. VMware customers need a storage solution they can count on to increase total resource utilization and productivity, adapt quickly to changing business conditions, protect storage investments, and maintain business continuity in the face of unexpected disasters. Combining the reliable performance of the P6000 EVA with VMware delivers the business solutions needed to drive return on investment that adds to profitability.

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ResourcesTo understand how HP P6000 EVAs can empower your business, visit: Experience what HP can do for your business: www.hp.com/go/solutiondemoportal HP Storage for VMware: http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/us/en/solutions/storagevmware.html HP and VMware Alliances: http://hp.com/go/vmware HP ActiveAnswers for VMware applications: http://h71019.www7.hp.com/ActiveAnswers/cache/71086-0-0-225-121.html HP Converged Infrastructure: Unleash the potential of your infrastructure todaybe ready for the future. http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/solutions/converged/main.html HP Single Point of Connectivity Knowledge (SPOCK): http://www.hp.com/storage/SPOCK Data Storage from HP: http://www.hp.com/go/storage HP SAN: http://www.hp.com/go/SAN Find out more about P6000 SAN capabilities, case studies, and technical details, at: HP P6000 Disk Array Systems http://www.hp.com/go/P6000 http://www.hp.com/go/EVA HP P6300/P6500 Sizer: http://h30144.www3.hp.com/SWDSizerWeb/default.htm To help us turn your business vision into a strategy for the data center that gets you a better business outcome, visit: http://www.hp.com/go/P6000

Copyright 2011 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. 4AA2-5532ENW, Created June 2011; Updated September 2011, Rev. 1