HPE Storage Users Group

Hi,

in our rigorously segmented LAN, storage and vCenter can not "see" each other. But we are thinking about changing this.

Can anybody please share her/his experiences with integrating 3PAR-arrays with vCenter?

• What plugins/software product do you use - and for what?
• Do you use the "HP StoreFront Analytics Pack for VMware vCOPS" for monitoring?
• For what tasks do you use this vCenter integration, and for what do you fall back to traditionall storage software (IMC, SystemReporter)?
• So you consider this integration a "must", or is it just nice to have?
• Do you "feel" any acceleration with snapshots, clones, ...?

Thank you in advance!

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When all else fails, read the instructions.

Much of the below depends on how you want to manage and provision storage, if you're a storage admin then it's probably not that relevant but if you a VMware guy then these tools can really add value.

Have a look on youtube for an overview of the features HP StoreFront Analytics Pack for VMware vCOPS, if you really need it you'll know, but it's fairly new so don't expect large scale adoption at this point.

The vCentre integration is typically used for day to day provisioning from within vCentre, not only does it carve storage but handles the whole presentation, rescan and mounting of the data store as a single action. With Recovery Manager licensed you can also manage snapshot scheduling and recovery from snapshot.

I don't really think any of these plugins should be considered a replacement for IMC or system reporter, they just simplify day to day tasks from a single interface. If you really need to know what's happening under the covers then you need direct access to the array.

Whether these are a must or nice to have will depend where your focus is, the vCentre plugin is free so why not make use of it. VCops and recovery manager cost but they also add a lot more functionality to the environment.

I'm not sure what's being asked around acceleration with snapshots / clones. I assume using hardware based snaps vs VMware and VAAI Full copy to speed up cloning. I'll let others answer with their numbers and experience, but both offload things in different ways.

A hardware snap reduces the time a software snap needs to be around and thus removes the divergence and subsequent consolidation/merge required later as it's all handled at the array. Veeam's snapshot integration and 3PAR recovery Manager both use this software then hardware method to integrate with VMware snaps. VAAI offloads the copy process to the array meaning the data doesn't have to transit from the array through the SAN to the host and back down again, this is very mature technology these day, there also used to be a quite a few demo's of this in action up on youtube.

But like I said if your a VM admin then these will float your boat, if your more storage then probably not.

We have two T800s connected to the same ESX5 farm. We tried to implement VASA in hopes that it would make ESX smart enough to know not to use T10 copy offloading when trying to move a VMDK from one T800 to the other, but we got lost along the way... the instructions were not very good and some point stated that we need install HP insight manger, which didnt seem to make sense to us, so its been back burnered for now.

Other than that, we dont use any of the plugins or integration. We administer the storage with storage tools and we administer ESX with esx tools. It helps to have a good labeling standard, would recommend naming your datastores and virtual volumes with the LUN#

Integration was neither a nice or a must as we have separate teams responsible for Vmware and storage. We do not have recovery manager for Vmware so no comment on the speed of snaps... however the T10 copy offloading should work without additional plug ins.

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

I tend to side with Richard. We tried HP's Insight plugin and RM-V and both are too quirky and buggy and RM-V does not scale well. We run 830+ VMs on a V400 with 440TB. We just started moving all our DB VMs to a 7400 that has SSD and 10K drives. We use vcenter for the VMs, and 3par IMC, CLI and System Reporter for the arrays. We wrote powershell scripts to interacte VM snaps with array snaps.

Hi,



Why don't you want T10 copy offloading??

Seems like we underestimated this - I thought just connecting the 3PAR and vCenter per IP is all it needs, we didn't know about any "implementing" stuff...

What we hope to achieve:

• Common naming, without those naa.xxx SCSI-IDs as the only common name between storage and ESX
• offloading some simple day to day tasks like "could you please grow this lun from 4 to 6TB?" to the esx guys
• change vmware software snapshots into storage array hardware snapshots

_________________
When all else fails, read the instructions.

I thought VASA was enabled by default in vsphere 5.0+ on 3par?

VAAI (SCSI offload primitives etc) are enabled by default.

"No HP 3PAR VAAI plug-in is required for ESXi 5.x to work with 3PAR OS 3.1.1 and later, as VMware T10 compliance is supported natively."

But VASA (VMware Management) requires the plugin I believe to pull the array management, mapping, health, replication etc into vCentre.

The Full RM product is available here for trial https://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdep ... ARRMVSUITE

Good recent document including the API integrations here
http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.asp ... 286ENW.pdf

Ah I mixed up VASA with VAAI.

3par Recovery Manger for vSphere is terrible product.
1. Application itself is terrible, requires everything to be scheduled (if you plan to take snaphoots at a regular intervals for DR purposes) under one account. It was not designed with multiple administrators in mind.

2. If you want to quince VM via VMware tools to have application consistent snapshot there is a limitation - up to 8 VMs per datastore (read VV).

3. You need additional licensing if you want multiple point in time restores.


4. Compatibility issues

That beats me. I thought

http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/h ... cachetoken

is the one place to look for all 3PAR related documentation, but the file linked is completely new for me.

Please help me: What is the best strategy/place/link/whatever for finding new docus? IS there a one-stop-solution? Or does one have to crawl the dark dungeons of hp.com in hope of not missing that one important how-to-not-fail-catastrophically??

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When all else fails, read the instructions.