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StoreVirtual VSA

HPE introduces native Docker drivers for 3PAR and StoreVirtual

by Philip Sellers June 16, 2016

The following post has been edited. The capabilities originally reported are not in this release the Docker storage drivers and the post has been updated for accuracy.

HPE announced last week at HPE Discover that it will be shipping native Docker storage drivers for 3PAR StoreServ and StoreVirtual arrays. This storage driver will allow for the persistent Docker images natively stored on the company’s arrays.

In the initial release, HPE is releasing a driver that can be used for Docker containers that require persistent storage – like database servers. The persistent volume will be stored on the 3PAR or StoreVirtual arrays directly in bare metal Docker deployments. The Docker-Integrated Volume Plugin for HPE 3PAR StoreService is available from the HPE Storage GitHub page at https://github.com/hpe-storage/python-hpedockerplugin. According to HPE, the Plugin supports Docker Compose; Docker Swarm; application mobility across Docker Engine nodes; secured etcd clusters; and iSCSI CHAP authentication. Also supported are Docker Volume options for volume size, provisioning (thin, full, or deduplicated) and adaptive flash caching for 3PAR StoreServ. StoreVirtual supports volume size and provisioning (thin or full).

In addition to the Docker storage drivers, HPE also announced a wide-spread partnership with Docker which includes full hardware certification for HPE Servers and Docker shipping on all new HPE servers starting later in the year. The partnership also allows HPE customers a single point-of-contact for enterprise support of the whole solution. HPE is also working with Docker to enable monitoring for Docker environments from HPE Site Scope.

June 16, 2016 0 comment

HPE is talking about Composable Data Fabric

by Philip Sellers June 16, 2016

written by Philip Sellers

Last week at HPE Discover, HPE introduced the idea of a Composable Data Fabric on the show floor to customers. While there was no specific product announcement around the concept, the idea is HPE’s vision for the future of software defined storage. The overall strategy will utilize HPE OneView for management and control along with HPE StoreVirtual as the storage platform.

Composable Data Fabric is the idea of federation and data mobility within software defined storage. Regardless of how you start with StoreVirtual, HPE is working to create the ability to move your data from one StoreVirtual system to another. This will offer its customers the ability to migrate their data seamlessly and nondisruptively to and from any form factor to another. The solution will be hardware agnostic since it is based on HPE StoreVirtual – meaning it can be installed on standard HPE ProLiant servers, purpose built HPE StoreVirtual hardware, StoreVirtual VSA on ESXi and inside of Synergy Platform, HyperConvered and ConvergedSystem solutions. One of the main goals is to ease the disruptive and difficult nature of data migrations.

Composable Data Fabric is also about enabling all the needed services within StoreVirtual – specifically adding the ability to do file services and object storage, in addition to block. In the near future, HPE is saying that StoreVirtual will be able to natively host file services, the same way that 3PAR StoreServ arrays are able to.

The Composable Data Fabric idea continues on the path of growth and innovation to the StoreVirtual line of storage. Within the Synergy Platform composable infrastructure strategy, StoreVirtual plays the key role to unlocking local disks within one frame and exposing that data storage to systems throughout the rest of the data fabric or network connected to the Synergy. Because StoreVirtual allows Synergy to become its own storage array, Synergy can become a self-contained platform for hosting any application – whether its cloud-native, virtualized or traditional client-server, with the ability to flex and change as requirements change.

The primary takeaway from the announcement is that customers will enjoy complete flexibility and mobility for their data between StoreVirtual installations – regardless of the shape or size. By mixing different instances of StoreVirtual with different performance capabilities, its easy to envision a great software-defined storage with tiers of storage based on performance or cost. Add the ability to move data seamlessly between them as the requirements of the data change, and that becomes a winning combination.

June 16, 2016 0 comment

Datacenter Storage Virtualization

Use raw disks for StoreVirtual VSA to avoid warnings and maximize capacity

by Philip Sellers August 21, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

Last year at HP Discover, I was preparing for my first StoreVirtual VSA deployment. I spoke with a couple different folks from the StoreVirtual team. The main piece of advice I was given was to use raw disk mappings under the StoreVirtual VSA. At first, I questioned this. But there is good logic to this recommendation. Now, my source is HP staff, but this isn’t in their official guidelines anywhere that I have found…

Scenario without RDM’s

So, take the scenario if we did not use raw disk mappings with the StoreVirtual VSA. You would create local VMFS datastores on the local drives connected to the host. You would only need one VMFS and you would deploy the VSA onto this disk. Then, you would then create additional VMDK files for the data disks behind the StoreVirtual VSA on the same VMFS datastore. You could create multiple VMFS and do the same thing, if you like.

Now, when you created your VMDK data disk to use your full VMFS capacity, vSphere would throw a disk space alarm for your VMFS datastore. The alarms are not customizable to say alarm on these VMFS created in the StoreVirtual VSA (which you will want later), but do not alarm on these local disk VMFS. So, you would always have alarm conditions if you used the full size of the VMFS.

First point, to avoid alarms, you would need to consume 80% or less of the VMFS capacity. But, why would you ever want to leave capacity on the table, never to be used? You want to maximize the capacity you have in your local servers.

Second point, you are never going to snapshot your VSAs. You don’t need any spare capacity for snapshot delta disks. With the VSA, you have multiple copies of the data on additional StoreVirtual (VSA or physical) and that is your redundancy. In fact, snapshots at the VSA level are dangerous. You should avoid these at all cost.

Scenario with RDM’s

My recommendation would be to create two local disks on the ESXi host that will run the VSA. The first disk should be small – possibly RAID1 – and will be formatted as a VMFS datastore. The second, possibly RAID5 or RAID6 would be your storage for the VSA. It would not be a VMFS and would instead be presented to the VSA as a raw disk mapping. This allows you to use 100% of the raw capacity, with no alarms and direct access to the underlying disk.

When you deploy the VSA, do not specify any data disks during the deployment. I used the Zero To VSA toolkit for my deployments and it allows this configuration to be deployed.

The complication with the RDM plan is that vSphere does not show local disks as available storage to present as a raw disk mapping. You will need to do some work with vmkfstools to create a VMDK file, on the primary VMFS with the StoreVirtual VSA files, and point this to the physical location of the second volume. Once you create the VMDK, you may attach it to the VSA and begin your configuration.

The first step is to identify the device ID of the unformatted, data disk. To do this, open SSH or a remote shell to the ESXi host. You will want to navigate to /vmfs/devices/ or /dev/disks and run an ls -la to list the device names. Hopefully you only have two or three devices listed – possibly your boot disk, your VMFS disk and your data disk. You may identify your data disk because it will be the name without a symbolic link associated. The ID you are looking for will begin with “naa.”

The vmkfstools command to create the VMDK raw disk mapping file is:

[code]vmkfstools -z /vmfs/devices/ID /vmfs/Volumes/VMFSDatastore/SVApplianceName/SVApplianceName_2.vmdk[/code]

Change VMFSDatastore to match the name you assign to your VMFS when you created it. Change the StoreVirtual1 to be the directory/name you named your appliance on this host. And lastly, specify a name for the vmdk file.

Now, edit settings. You attach the VMDK file you just created. Browse to the location you specified in vmkfstools and select the VMDK file. Repeat this for each virtual appliance.

Lastly, boot the VSA and use the StoreVirtual Centralized Managed console and its wizards to setup the VSA and cluster the individual VSAs into a software storage array.

August 21, 2015 1 comment

Compute Datacenter Storage Virtualization

How the HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC StoreVirtual improves deployment times

by Philip Sellers February 17, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

Back in December at HP Discover EMEA, I had a chance to speak with several folks who walked me through the HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC StoreVirtual solution and specifically how this solution streamlines deployment times and processes for a self-contained VMware environment.

The HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC StoreVirtual consists of 4 identical nodes that resemble a blade, but without a full enclosure around the blade itself. The photo below shows one of the nodes outside of the chassis of the 200-HC StoreVirtual chassis. The 200-HC, both EVO:RAIL and StoreVirtual, are built on the HP ProLiant SL2500 model scalable computing hardware.

The software layer of the ConvergedSystem 200-HC StoreVirtual is the HP flavor of VMware ESXi preinstalled for each node. The HP installation of ESXi includes some agents within the OS for monitoring hardware and providing that information into ESXi and vCenter. Each node is physically connected to 6 dedicated drives on the front of the chassis. For the all SAS model, all 6 are a single RAID set for the node and in the hybrid storage model, it features 2 x 400GB SSD drives and 4 x 1.2 TB SAS drives in two RAID sets.

When the system boots for the first time, the ESXi hosts start up along with a management VM located on node 1. An additional management port on node 1 provides access directly to the management VM to connect and configure the ConvergeSystem 200-HC for the first time. This node will present the user with the OneView InstantOn wizard that will allow the user to deploy the full ConvergeSystem 200-HC software stack in as little as 15 minutes. The wizard walks you through the initial setup of the 4 ESXi nodes, with IP addresses and other basic settings. InstantOn then deploys StoreVirtual VSA across the nodes, configures the storage in ESXi and connects it to the StoreVirtual VMs. Last but not least, the management VM moves into the new StoreVirtual VSA software defined storage and the system is ready to run.

The hardware configurations in the ConvergedSystem 200-HC StoreVirtual are defined and not customizable. With the exception of the choice between all-SAS or SAS and SSD combined hybrid storage, there are no other configurable options for a 200-HC configuration. This lends its self nicely to a very smooth and repeatable deployment.

Like other HP ConvergedSystems, the defined and fully tested hardware and software configurations (aka recipe) ensures a well behaving and optimized operating environment for the workload. This is essentially the same hardware configuration as the EVO:Rail systems defined by VMware and manufactured by many vendors, including HP, but this HP solution is unique in its use of StoreVirtual instead of VMware’s VSAN. The HP folks I talked with think this is an advantage for several reasons, including a more mature storage software base in StoreVirtual compared to VSAN, the ability to replicate data between an HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC StoreVirtual and any other StoreVirtual based solution (both VSA and hardware solutions), and because of the StoreVirtual VSA price. The list storage license cost of StoreVirtual VSA is around $3,000 per node, which is about one third of the cost of a VMware’s VSAN license, while all of the components are apples for apples.

February 17, 2015 0 comment

Compute Datacenter Storage

HP bundling StoreVirtual VSA with new ProLiant purchases

by Philip Sellers December 6, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

HP is bringing software defined storage to the masses by bundling the StoreVirtual VSA (virtual storage appliance) with the purchase of new ProLiant hardware. The new offer, announced November 12, is available with 10 models of ProLiant and includes a 1TB entitlement for StoreVirtual VSA. That license can be combined on up to 3 nodes for a total capacity of 3TB of total storage in a free software SAN. And although the license is limited to 3 nodes within the StoreVirtual cluster, the storage can be made accessible to any connected servers in the site.

The new offer is attractive for small office or enterprise remote office deployments where typically only a few servers are deployed. HP is targeting the SMB market with the new offer in an attempt to gain market for the StoreVirtual software defined storage line of products according to Dale Degen, category manager for Software Defined Storage at HP.

“I’m pretty excited because this will expand the scope of who has been exposed to this concept,” Degen said during a call this week.

Chock full of features

The free 1TB licenses are no gimmick. The licenses include the full package of StoreVirtual capabilities, excluding Adaptive Optimization. Those capabilities include large enterprise features like asynchronous replication, snapshots, thin provisioning, network RAID and storage clustering. The only thing not included with the 1TB license is HP’s Adaptive Optimization feature for sub-LUN tiering and support. Users who want support for the StoreVirtual can upgrade to a retail copy of StoreVirtual, with pricing beginning at $3,000 list for 3 nodes of 4TB each and includes 3 years of support. Although the free licenses are limited to 3 node clusters, customers are free to create multiple clusters and the StoreVirtual Centralized Management Console manages multiple storage clusters easily, which is a great benefit to larger companies who may have StoreVirtual storage at both primary and remote sites.

The free licenses are easy to obtain, according to Degen. Any of the eligable ProLiant servers shipping after November 1 include a sticker with a key that can be used to unlock the license from the HP website. Customers can take their keys and and fulfill the request, download the VSA software package and retrieve the licenses.

From personal experience, the deployment process of the StoreVirtual VSA is very easy. Users can obtain the ‘Zero to VSA’ toolkit, as Degen called it, from the HP website which offers a streamlined deployment process for the VSA. In my lab environment, the manual deployment steps took about 10 minutes – mostly pointing the wizard to your vSphere or Hyper-V environment and then letting it push out the appliance. Deegan also said that the Zero to VSA toolkit includes a CLI environment which could let power users automate the deployment in enterprise environments.

SMB users: what is StoreVirtual and what’s a VSA?

Many SMB users may not have heard of HP StoreVirtual and may be wondering what it is all about. At a high level, StoreVirtual takes the local storage inside of a server and uses software to pool the storage and offering it up as an iSCSI based SAN. Multiple servers deployed with StoreVirtual also pool together and replicate among each other to create a RAIN (redundant array of independent nodes) configuration. Like RAID, RAIN is the concept of stripes or mirrors for the data between nodes. StoreVirtual is a software-only solution, although HP also sells hardware solutions created around StoreVirtual software. Originally created by Lefthand Networks, the StoreVirtual continues to run the Lefthand OS on bare metal installs and inside of the VSA or virtual storage appliance. Lefthand OS, formerly known as SAN/iQ, is currently at verison 11 and is a very mature product in a market full of new solutions.

StoreVirtual’s feature set is also on par with much larger enterprise storage platforms, but by utilizing existing storage or servers, it offers a much lower price point for many customers looking for SAN storage. Virtualization and particuarlly vSphere have pushed many SMB users to look towards SAN solutions to accommodate virtual workloads and provide highly available storage.

The VSA (virtual storage appliance) concept is an outgrowth of the Lefthand OS within a virtual machine. Like installing Lefthand OS on bare metal hardware, the VSA uses onboard, local storage under the ESXi or Hyper-V hypervisor and creates pools on this storage so that it can be served up for any number of uses on the network, but many times that use case is to store virtual machines. While the VSA can present storage back to its local virtual host machines, it can also be used by any other server or virtual host with connectivity to its SAN network.

Sounds great, how to I get it?

For all the latest information about the offer, about StoreVirtual VSA and about how to take advantage, go to the HP website at http://hp.com/go/FreeVSA.

December 6, 2013 0 comment