HP LeftHand Zero to VSA demo
One of the things I like to do is play with our gear and show you. Those blog post and videos tend to be pretty popular. With the help of our Technical Marketing guys (thanks Chris!), I was able to get a hold of everything I needed to play around with our HP LeftHand P4000. I have a number of videos that I'll show you over the next week or so. Whether you have a P4000 or not, I think you'll find what I have got interesting.
What is VSA?
I've talked about the P4000 VSA or Virtual SAN Appliance a few times on ATSB, especially when I did some comparisons with the VSA that VMware announced last summer. If you're not familiar with our VSA, there's a good high-level value statement of what it does on the VSA's hp.com product page. It says: Virtual SANs for virtual servers - Turn any Microsoft or VMware virtualized server's internal and / or direct-attached storage into a virtual SAN, without the expense of added storage hardware.
And the even better news is there is a full featured 60 day trial of it you can play with yourself; get it at www.hp.com/go/TryVSA.
Today's video: Zero to VSA
With the latest release of SAN/iQ 9.5, one of the new features we got is Zero to VSA automated installation and deployment. Zero to VSA is an all new installer for our VSA software that:
- Speeds and simplifies install process for one or more VSAs
- Single installer can install VSA, Failover Manager (FOM), and Centralized Management Console (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 (Scriptable option only for VMware in v1 of Zero to VSA)
The video I have is a screen capture of me using the Zero to VSA to create six P4000 storage nodes in a VMware environment. Here's the video:
In the coming days, I'll have video of what I do with these nodes, including building a cluster, creating volume and the stuff I'm really looking forward to showing you, doing a cluster swap and volume migration while the data is online.
Learn more
You can learn more about the P4000 family at www.hp.com/go/P4000 (I just love that we have such common sense URL's to help you find things). Check back in the next couple of days for more demo videos.
