HPE Storage Users Group

Has anyone had experience virtualizing 3PAR storage behind a VPlex?

Currently evaluating a 7400 but they want to stick it behind a VPlex alongside a VNX2. I'm not familiar with EMC storage... If I configured the 3par cpgs for NL, SSD, and FC disk, how do the 3 tiers compare with the VNX2 throughput?

Thank you.

Are VPLEX and 3PAR on each other's compatibility matrices?

Not sure your question is answerable. I don't believe its feasable to compare a 3PAR cpg to a VNX2 frame... adjusting that question to be apples to apples:

100x Nearline Spindles on 3PAR using chunklet based raid wide striping vs 100x Nearline Spindles on VNX2 using disk based raid groups, hands down 3PAR will perform better.

For starters, the VNX is (imho) crippled by the deployment of legacy disk based raid groups and hot sparing. For every 30 or so spindles, they recommend 1 hot spare. A hot spare in disk based raid means an entire spindle is set aside, to do nothing. In the chunklet based raid technology deployed by 3PAR, as well as XIV and Compellent, space space is distributed over all the disks, so every spindle in the system is used for the daily workload.

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Richard Siemers
The views and opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

AFAIK EMC will support 3PAR behind Vplex. but it isn't something HP qualify or test so the onus of support for this on EMC.

If you stick any virtualization appliance in front of an advanced array, you basically turn it into a JBOD. Not only that you increase latency, increase your overall licensing and support costs whilst remaining constantly behind the curve when it comes to updates. The old lie about reducing complexity and unifying platforms doesn't hold up to even basic scrutiny with solution complexity and management actually increasing greatly, which in turn creates greater risk through larger failure domains and and unanticipated and often undocumented failure modes.

I'm not saying appliance based virtualization doesn't have a place, but mixing storage vendors with dissimilar capabilities across a cluster is typically never a great idea. The main reason many of these appliances still exist is to bring some form of common management and feature set to vendors with multiple incompatible platforms, hence EMC's and IBM's reliance on Vplex and SVC.

In short, this is doable but really it removes most of the value 3PAR's feature set brings to the table.

One important detail to observe when using a virtualization appliance is to understand how the appliance redundantly connects to the storage. IBM SVC and Netapp vSeries both are active/passive on the fibre paths to the LUN, and only support 2 paths. VPLEX supports ALUA with 3PAR so I presume this would be active/active and preferred.

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Richard Siemers
The views and opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

Yeah, this is all new to me so I'm just starting to look it up. I'm not totally familiar with EMC's arrays or technologies so I need to brush up on that. Coming from an HP world I need to do that to see what the differences are so I can better understand - Cleanur, would you mind briefly outline what you mean by your last statement?

The place I'm at has a vast array of EMC stuff to one 7400, and they're looking at possibly integrating it to their infrastructure by deploying it behind the VPlex.

Vplex virtualizes each array and makes them all look the same from a host presentation perspective e.g VNX, VMAX, 3PAR, Netapp etc. What that means is all arrays inherit the features of the Vplex with most of their native features being masked behind Vplex and therefore become less useful on a practical level.

You can still use some of the native features so long as they're transparent to Vplex but effectively you get the lowest common denominator functionality from Vplex. Much of that built in functionality or the licensed features you paid for aren't really too useful behind Vplex and if you do want to take advantage of them. Then you still need to manage backend 3PAR and front end Vplex separately.

One of the many reasons EMC pre announced and made so much noise about VIPR.

Vplex provides a way for EMC to federate arrays behind a virtualization appliance, whereas 3PAR provides inbuilt peer based federation through Peer Motion / Peer Persistence. The peer part meaning each array brings along and keeps it's own individual features and is directly accessible without the need to add an expensive speed bump in a external virtualization appliance.