There are a lot great blog posts about the HP StorageWorks P4000 SAN arrays (formally known as HP Lefthand). I think the articles written by Frank Denneman are one of the most famous 🙂 . Anyway, a few days ago I had a chance to work with the HP P4300 SAN’s myself when I was configuring a new virtual infrastructure for one of our customers. There were 4 HP StorageWorks P4300 SAN arrays, 2 at the main site and 2 at the failover site.
Creating LUN’s with the SAN/iQ software is quite straight forward so I’ll skip that. There are some things to keep in mind when configuring you ESX(i) hosts though.
- The native ESX(i) VMkernel Multipath I/O (MPIO) cannot be used with the HP Lefthand arrays in multi-site design that are located in two different subnets. The MPIO cannot be routed across the subnets by the ESX(i) iSCSI initiator. (See this doc from HP on page 7).
- In a multi-site design, use one VMkernel port per physical adapter and set the path selection policy to fixed (Page 11 of the doc mentioned above).
- Do not use the IP addresses of the SAN nodes, use the Virtual IP address of each site when configuring the iSCSI target discovery on the ESX(i) host. This will provide distribution of the iSCSI sessions across the nodes and maximize performance and bandwidth utilization.
Okay, that’s just my two cents 🙂
Cheers!
– Marek.Z