I upgraded the vmFocus lab last night to LeftHand OS 10.0 as with anything new and shiny, I feel an overwhelming urge to try it!
So what’s new? Well according to the HP Storage Blog the following:
- Increased Windows integration – We now offer Active Directory integration which will allow administrators to manage user authentication to HP StoreVirtual Storage via the Windows AD framework. This simplifies management by bringing SAN management under the AD umbrella. With 10.0 we are also providing support for Windows Server 2012 OS.
- Improved performance – The engineering team has been working hard with this release and one of the great benefits comes with the performance improvements. LeftHand OS version 10.0 has numerous code enhancements that will improve the performance of HP StoreVirtual systems in terms of application performance as well as storage related functions such as snapshots and replication. The two major areas of code improvements are in multi-threading capabilities and in internal data transmission algorithms.
- Increased Remote Copy performance – You’ll now experience triple the performance through optimization of the Remote Copy feature that can reduce you backup times by up to 66%.
- Dual CPU support for VSA – In this release, the VSA software will now ship with 2 vCPUs enabled. This capability, in addition multi-threading advancements in 10.0, enhances performance up to 2x for some workloads. As a result of this enhancement, we will now also support running 2 vCPUs in older versions of VSA. So if you’ve been dying to try it, go ahead. Our lab tests with SAN/iQ 9.5 and 2 vCPUs showed an up to 50% increase in performance.
- Other performance improvements – 10.0 has been re-engineered to take advantage of today’s more powerful platforms, specifically to take better advantage of multi-core processors, and also improves the performance of volume resynchronization and restriping and merging/deleting snapshot layers.
Active Directory Integration
The first thing I wanted to get up and running was Active Directory integration. So I went ahead and created a Security Group called CMC_Access
Naturally, we need a user to be in a Security Group, so I created a service account called CMC and popped this into the CMC_Access Security Group
Into the CMC, oops I mean the new name which is HP LeftHand Centralized Management Console. Expand your Management Group and Right Click Administration and Select Configure External Authentication.
Awesome, we now need to configure the details as follows:
- Bind User Name the format is username@domain. So in my case it’s cmc@vmfocus.local
- Bind Password is your password, so in my case it’s ‘password’
- Active Directory Server IP Address 192.168.37.201 (which is VMF-DC01), your port is 389
- Base Distinguished Name this is DC=vmfocus, DC=local
Hit ‘Validate Active Directory’ and you should be golden.
Hit Save, don’t worry it will take a while.
TOP TIP: If your note sure what your Base Distinguished Names is, launch ADSI Edit and that will soon tell you.
Next we need to Right Click on Administration and choose New Group
Give your Group a name and a Description, I’m going to roll with cmc_access (I know original) and they are going to have Full rights. We then need to click on Find External Group
In the ‘Enter AD User Name’ enter the Bind User Name from the External Authentication, so in my case this is cmc@vmfocus.local and hit OK
If all has gone to plan, you should see your Active Directory Group, select this and hit OK
It should appear in the Associate an External Group dialogue box, hit OK
Then logout and log back in again as your Active Directory user, making sure that you use the format name@domain
One of the odd things that I have noticed, is that it takes an absolute age to login, not sure why this is, but I’m sure HP will fix it in an upcoming release!
VMFocus 