Part 2 – How To Install & Configure HP StoreVirtual VSA On vSphere 5.1

Great news, it’s time to fire the HP StoreVirtual VSA’s up!  Excellent, once they have booted, we need to login and configure the IP address of each SAN.

To do this go onto the console screen and type start and press enter

Press enter to login

TOP TIP, to navigate around use tab not the arrow keys

Tab down to Network TCP/IP Settings and press enter

Tab to eth0 and press enter

Type in your hostname, in my case it’s SATAVSA01.vmfocus.local then your IP information

 Once done, go over to OK and then log out.

Rinse and repeat for eth1, obviously giving it a different IP Address!

Then continue for anymore HP StoreVirtual VSA’s you have in your environment.

In my lab, I have four in total, which are:

• SATAVSA01
• SATAVSA02
• SSDVSA01
• SSDVSA02

In fact, let’s show you a picture along with my IP address schema.

Now you are probably thinking that’s great Craig, but I’m not seeing how I do my SAN configuration? Well for that we need to use the HP P4000 Centralized Management Console.

HP P4000 Centralized Management Console

The HP P4000 Centralized Management Console or CMC as it will now be known, is where all the magic happens! OK well not magic, it’s where we configure all the settings for the HP StoreVirtual VSA.

In the previous blog post Part 1 – How To Install & Configure HP StoreVirtual VSA On vSphere 5.1 we downloaded the HP StoreVirtual VSA software.  In the extracted package we also have the CMC which we need to install to be able to manage the VSA’s.

Jump onto the laptop/server you want to install the CMC onto and navigate to the folder which contains CMC_InstallerCMC_9.5.00.1215_Installer and run this.

I tend to install the CMC onto the server running vCenter, just makes life easier having everything in one place.

It takes a short while to initialize, but we should see this screen soon.

Hit OK, then follow the onscreen prompts, you know the usual next, accept EULA next, OK.

Awesome, so hopefully, you should see the CMC installing.

Launch the CMC and voila we have a screen full of err nothing!

It actually makes sense, as we need to tell the CMC to find the VSA’s we installed via there IP address’s. To do this, click Add and enter your IP Address.  Mine are:

• 10.37.10.11
• 10.37.10.13
• 10.37.10.15
• 10.37.10.17

If all goes well, you should see your VSA’s being populated.

Click on Add, and hold on a minute, where have they gone? Don’t worry you can see them under Available Systems on the left hand side.

Let’s crack on and start configuring.  Select the Getting Start from the left hand panel and choose 2. Management Groups, Clusters and Volumes Wizard:

Hit next, and we want to create a New Management Group. But what is a ‘management group’ well it’s a logical grouping of VSA’s which are clustered to provide scalability and resilience.  Let’s say we had one SAN with RAID 10 which is a common deployment.  SAN’s are built for resilience e.g. dual PSU’s, dual disk controllers, multiple NIC’s per controller.  If you loose a disk controller, then even though the SAN continues to work you get a massive performance hit as the SAN will go ‘aha’ I don’t have a redundant disk controller and therefore I will turn caching off and every write will be written directly to disk.

If we have  two VSA’s or P4000 within a Management Group that are Clustered running Network RAID 10 we can avoid this situation.  Pretty neat eh?

The first thing we want to do is create a new Management Group and click Next.

Then give the Management Group a name, for me, it’s going to be SATAMG01 as I’m going to have two Management Groups, one for SATA and one for SSD.  Then select the VSA’s which will held by the Management Group.  I have chosen SATAVSA01 and SATAVSA02.  We now get an additional box appear with a warning

‘to continue without installing a FOM, select the checkbox below acknowledging that a FOM is required to provide the highest level of data availability for a 2 storage system management group configuration. Then click next’.

Crikey that’s a bit of warning, what does it mean? Well well essentially it’s about quorum, a term that I’m sure alot of you are familiar with when working with Windows clusters.  Each VSA run’s whats known as a ‘manager’ which is really a vote.  When we have two VSA’s we have two votes, which is a tie.  Let’s say that one VSA has an issue and goes down, how does the the remaining VSA know that? Well it doesn’t, it could be that both VSA’s are up and they have lost’s the network between them.  This then result’s in split brain scenario.  The good news is if this occurs then both VSA’s go into a ‘holding state’ with no LUN access until either the original VSA comes back online or someone from IT performs manual intervention.

Don’t worry we are going to introduce a Failover Manager in a third logical site, I will go over the pre requisites for this in an upcoming blog post.

On the next page we need to enter an ‘Administrative User’ which will propagate down to the VSA’s so that if we try and access them, these are the credentials we need to supply.  Next pop in the details of an NTP server or manually set the time.  My recommendation is always to go for an NTP server preferably one of your DC’s so that your never more than 15 minutes out of sync which can cause dramas!

Onto DNS information now, pop in your DNS Domain Name, DNS Suffix and DNS Server

Onto Email Server settings now, enter in your email Server IP, Sender Address and Recipient Address

We now need to ‘Create a Cluster’ which is two or more VSA’s working in unison providing a highly available and resilient storage infrastructure.  In this case we are going to select Standard Cluster and click next.

Give the Cluster a name, I’m going to roll with SATACL01 and click Next.

This is where things start to get interesting, we now need to ‘Assign a Virtual IP’ to the cluster SATACL01. What does this do? Well all communication for the VSA’s goes via the Virtual IP Address allowing every block of information to be written to both VSA’s simultaneously.  How cool?

Click Add and then Next.

We are now in a position to Create a Volume.  Enter the name,  in my case SATAVOL01 and choose a Data Protection Level.  The choices are Network RAID 0, if we use this then we have no protection, so best to select Network RAID-10 (2-Way-Mirror) and enter your Reported Size.

I have always thought that the Reported Size is quite strange, as why would you want to reported size which is greater than your physical space available? Essentially it’s a poor relation to thin provisioning so the ‘storage team’ can say hey ‘VMware team’ look we have created you a 10TB Volume when in fact they only have 5TB of actual space.

Select either Full or Thin Provisioning and click Finish.  Time to make a cup of tea as this is going to take a while.  Once done you should end up with a screen like this.

Note, you will get a warning about licensing, this is expected.  We are ‘cooking on gas’.  Now it’s time to present the volumes to VMware.

vSphere iSCSI Configuration

For the iSCSI configuration we are going to head into VMware, to grab the initiator FQDN’s.  For completeness, I’m going to cover this as well!

Head into vCenter then onto your ESXi Host, select the Configuration Tab, then select Storage Adapters followed by Add and choose ‘Add Software iSCSI Adapter’

Now that’s done we need to bind out VMKernel Port Group to iSCSI.  To do this click your new iSCSI Software Adapter and click Properties.  This essentially says ‘hey I’m going to use this special VMKernel port for iSCSI traffic’.

Select the Network Configuration tab and click Add

Then select your iSCSI Port Group and click OK

Hopefully, once done it looks a bit like this.

Next we need to enter in the IP Address’s of the VSA Virtual IP Address we want to connect to under the Dynamic Discovery Tab.  Again it should resemble something like this.

Last bit of work before we head back over to the CMC, is that we need to grab the vSphere iSCSI Initiator FQDN.  Good news this is the page we find ourselves at.  So get make a note of what yours are.

Mine are:

• ESXi02 – iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:ESXi02-0f9ca9cc
• ESXi03 – iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:ESXi03-36a2ee1c

CMC iSCSI Configuration

We are on the final hurdle! Expand your Management Group then select Servers, click Tasks > New Server

Complete the details and paste in the Initiator Node Name.  Rinse and repeat for the servers you want to present your volumes too.

TOP TIP, I recommend you set up a Server Cluster, this is feature of most SAN’s.  It enables you to group common ‘hosts’ together so that rather than having to present a volume to each server/host individually, you present it to the cluster saving you the administrator time (which I’m all for, as we can fit in more cups of tea).

Back to Tasks then Select New Server Cluster and enter the Cluster Name and Description. Once done it should resemble this.  I know great imagination Craig ‘ESXiCL01’

Last of all we need to ‘assign’ the cluster ESXiCL)1 to access the Volumes.  To do this go to Volumes and Snapshots right click the volume you want to present to your server and click ‘Assign and Unassign Server’.  Place a tick in Assigned.

A quick jump over to vCenter and a quick ‘Rescan All’ of our Storage Adapters should reveal.

Boom, there we have it! In the next blog post we can crack on and install the Failover Manager and perform some testing!