Here's the next session summary from the HP Tech Day held in Ft. Collins last week. This summary is based on the VMware integration session lead by Eric Siebert (VMware Solutions Manager) and Aboubacar Diare (VMware Integration Lead Engineer).
I have decent audio of this session - if you want to get the details but not watch the session on the web, here it is with a download link to follow:
You can download this podcast by doing a right click and save the file.
Eric Siebert, VMware Solution Manager
Eric began the session talking about overall integration with VMware:
All HP arrays support vSphere 5.0. VAAI is supports on all the HP arrays today except the P6000 EVA which is coming soon. Also VASA and SRM for vSphere 5.0 is supported on all arrays except the P2000 and support for both of those is coming soon.
HP has snapshot integration and recovery solutions for both 3PAR (Recover Manager Software for vSphere) and HP P4000 LeftHand (Application Aware Snapshot Manager). VMware has a new certification for geographically distributed data centers called vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) and the P4000 is the only iSCSI solution certified today. The P4000 VSA was the first (and still one of the only) product in the VMware Storage Virtual Appliance Program.
Eric also talked about the comparison between the HP and VMware VSA products. That has been covered on ATSB in the past but this summarizes what Eric discussed:
vSphere Storage API - Storage Awareness (or VASA)
• Array type
• LUN type (i.e. volume, snapshot)
• Thin-provisioned?
• Continuous Access relationship
• Replication State
VASA uses a VMware proprietary protocol
VASA holds a lot of promise but this is version 1.0 - Eric believes that VMware will continue to enhance it and make it better
HP Insight Control Storage Module for vCenter - allows VMware admin to “talk the same language” of storage admin. I supports all HP storage arrays except 3PAR which today has it's own plug-in. Expect that to change in the future.
> Linkage between Physical Storage and VMware objects
> Virtual Machine: to Datastore and RAW device mappings
> Datastore: to physical device mapping and VM mapping
> Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK): to virtual device mapping and physical device mapping
> RAW device mapping (RDM)
Insight Control Storage Module for vCenter helps with
> What storage features are in use for which volumes?
> Create a new datastore or expand an existing one
> Are the arrays operational and healthy?
> Easily create or clone virtual machines
> What datastore is associated to which volume(s)?
Aboubacar Diare, Master Architect
VMware Adaptive Queue Depth algorithm (Aboubacar asked who knew about this and no one indicated they had heard of this before)
Pluggable Storage Architecture
There are custom rules that you can add to the SATP rule table to set a default PSP for the SATP you want to use. Aboubacar showed an example of these rules that can avoid manually set the default path policy. Here's an example of an ESXi5 rule:
esxcli storage nmp satp rule add –s VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA –P VMW_PSP_RR –o iops –O iops=1 –c tpgs on –V HP –M HSV300 –e “Custom rule name”. You'll have to watch the video to get the details here.
VAAI
This session went deep and the notes don't do it justice. Here's the video of the session
UPDATE: A pdf copy of the slides used during the presentation are available below.
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