Lefthand P4000 and SRA

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/HP-LeftHand-P4000/HP-P4000-VSA-amp-SRA-for-Vmware-SRM-5/m-p/5420215

Equallogic, disappointing yet still awesome

http://www.krystalmods.com/index.php/2011/12/17/equallogic-and-xenserver-6-0-disapointing-yet-still-awesome

Comment to Dell:

Get your act together! This array is not cheap by any means. I expect that proper testing and documentation is done for all supported solutions! I don't blame the support personnels in this case. They had as much information as I did so how can they help me properly?

Texas school chooses Lefthand

http://informationweek.com/news/storage/disaster_recovery/232300673

delete a LUN from a lefthand (just interesting)

http://glazenbakje.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/vmware-delete-lun-from-esx-and-lefthand/

HP P4000 SAN Solutions - Issue While an Upgrade Is Interrupted

Something to look out for with the P4000

Issue

Sometimes when an upgrade is interrupted or a node is restarted during the upgrade, the upgrade process may still run. When trying to run the upgrade again, the following message may appear:

Solution

Use the backend to check the process running on that node. Rebooting the node is not a solution. Some process can start running again after the restart. Kill any upgrade process found using the command kill .

This guy loves his P4500 and p4300 Lefthand SAN

http://anticipationofaloversreturn.wordpress.com/tag/p4500-p4300-san-hp-lefthand-iscsi-hosted-call-recording-storage/

Horrible iSCSI performance with Lefthand

He thinks this is probably just a misconfiguration....

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1877156#1877156

I'm only testing with 1 nic as it also should be able to give 900mbit performance on the vmware enviroment.

Though I tried making 2 vmkernel NICs with different IP's on the same vswitch and bound them to iSCSI... then enabled Round-robin.

Has made no difference.

I don't think that the issue is related to load balancing tasks, but rather a communication issue between the vmware and the lefthand. The storage works perfectly when testet on a Windows 2008 server using MS iSCSI Initiator.

So it should be software related like a driver problem, misconfiguration or missing iSCSI tweaks. I just don't have a clue where the problem is.

HP P4000 SAN SANiQ 9.0 Kernel Panic Issue

http://jpaul.me/?p=2684


At some point after 208.5 days of continuous runtime, a counter in the SAN/iQ Linux kernel may incur a divide–by–zero error that leads to a kernel panic, which causes HP P4000 storage systems running SAN/iQ software version 9.0 or 9.0.01 to go offline immediately. 


After ten minutes, the HP P4300 G2, HP P4500 G2, HP P4800 G2 and HP LeftHand DL320s storage systems will perform an Automatic Server Recovery (ASR) followed by resumed operations. Other storage systems running SAN/iQ version 9.0 or 9.0.01 will hang indefinitely until manually rebooted.


I would definitively be upgrading if it were me!

Post about the Equallogic MEM plugin for vsphere 5.0

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/11/dells-multipath-extension-module-for-equallogic-now-supports-vsphere-50.html

I spoke with Andrew McDaniel, one of DELL's Lead Architects for VMware based in Ireland, and he was able to supply me with some additional information about this MEM. Firstly, since the MEM is essentially a PSP, devices from the EqualLogic array continue to use the Native Multipath Plugin (NMP) from VMware. This handles basic tasks like loading and unloading of MEMs, path discovery and removal, device bandwidth sharing between VMs, etc.

whip up a Cloud in a 17-inch box with 8 pinches of HP P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance

http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Around-the-Storage-Block-Blog/New-Converged-Storage-recipe-Cloud-in-a-box/ba-p/102465

Favorite quote

With licenses installed on all servers, what should you do with the server’s available drives? Take that pool of virtual machine-ready resources, which is currently DAS, and whip it into shared storage, with 8 pinches of HP P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance. These licenses will be installed in a VM on each server and the entire pool of disks can be turned into a clustered, highly available SAN.

Quick little post on EqualLogic and upgrading for upgrading for vsphere5

http://vinfrastructure.it/en/2011/11/upgrade-path-to-vsphere-5-the-storage-part/

Lefthand, HP StorageWorks P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance

Interesting security bulletin on the P4000

http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2011/Nov/72

SUPPORT COMMUNICATION - SECURITY BULLETIN

Document ID: c03082086
Version: 1

HPSBST02722 SSRT100279 rev.1 - HP StorageWorks P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance, Execution of Arbitrary Code

NOTICE: The information in this Security Bulletin should be acted upon as soon as possible.

Interesting post about Equallogic

Some of my favorite quotes are

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/167573-equallogic-ps6100xv-s

 I really came to find their products dead simple to use, with a uniform interface across models that made it simple to work with.


...


 I love it. It is easy to setup and manage. I only had to make a couple of calls to support during the setup process and those calls went very smooth.


....


With some of the Cons being:

My experience with Equallogics is that generally the hardware is ok but the software and firmware of late have left a lot to be desired.

The current firmware seems to be stable but all the version 5 stuff up to now has had bugs that caused some big issues. I am not a fan of the HIT kit, it slow and flaky and may stop working if you upgrade it, which is blow if you rely on it to drive your replication. Also you have to ensure you are on the right hard drive firmware as some of them are buggy as well.

Replication works quite well, best if you send multiple streams up a your pipe, with Jumbo frames we get almost a full 1Gb to our replication site.

....

Quorum best pratices on 4 node cluster

Question about setting up quorum for LH

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/HP-LeftHand-P4000/Quorum-best-pratices-on-4-node-cluster/m-p/5372499

HP LH 4000 versus Equallogic forum response

From

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/72924-gah-lefthand-san-or-equallogic-any-thoughts?page=2#entry-830476

When my company looked into getting a SAN appliance we were basically on the fence between equalogic and lefthand. We eventually settled on LeftHand. I think our deciding factor was the cost to a virtual san appliance for another office of ours. I'm not sure if equalogic has that feature and the sales reps were much worse than the sales rep for lefthand.

After about a year of use though, and the fact that we use Dell products for pretty much everything else, every time i have to call LeftHand/HP support I deeply regret our decision. I don't think I've spent any less time than 3 hours on the phone with them with 2.5 of those hours being hold. Once I get a tech they are knowledgeable and helpful which is good though. I am much happier with Dell support in general though.

vmware's new VSA

http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Around-the-Storage-Block-Blog/VMware-s-new-VSA-and-the-HP-P4000-LeftHand-VSA/ba-p/95461

Looks like HP\lefthand's VSA is still best

Interesting post, mainly people raving about equallogic

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1723470

I have 4x PS5000's (older model with 6x 1Gb Ethernet)

There fantastic, very easy to manage and perform well. Provisioning, growing and migrating LUNs to other nodes can all be done on the fly, makes life easy.

---

we got an Equallogic 5000X love it. nearly purchased new 10GbE one but need to wait a little longer to some $$$

highly recommneded. Feature packed and fully intergatable with other Equallogic models.

---

Equallogic chosen by First DataBank in the UK

http://www.softcat.com/news/article/softcatthe-perfect-partner-for-first-databank

“EqualLogic systems are simple to deploy, manage, and grow,” explained Ian Jones

LeftHand and storage manager, how to get it to work together

http://thwack.com/forums/63/storage-management/185/storage-manager-storage-profiler/32736/hp-p4000-lefthand-devices-do-n/

Hi There, We recently purchased Storage Manger specifically to monitor our HP 4000 LeftHand devices, but have since found out that the devices do not populate the required tables to storage manager for us to view the storage overview within the main console on storage manager.

A case for VSA, lefthand or maybe someone elses?

http://www.networkcomputing.com/deduplication/230800077

Of course, using vMotion requires shared storage, and there we hit a snag. My first choice, EqualLogic arrays, are just too expensive for this environment. Even a low-end disk array like an HP MSA or Dell MD3200 would cost more than $10,000 with six 300-GByte SAS drives, and that’s for a single controller model. Going to a dual controller system, which of course the enterprise storage guy inside me says is required, would add another $3,500 or so.

But if I installed a VSA with synchronous mirroring, like HP’s P4000 (Lefthand), StoreMagic, Falconstor NSS or Starwind HA, in each server, I could leverage the built-in RAID controllers, eliminate the storage controller as a single point of failure and theoretically improve reliability by storing two copies of all the data.

On the down side, I’ll give up some performance and host resources to the replication, but Dr. George’s I/O requirements are pretty light, and we have CPU to burn in the new config. Now I just have to choose a solution.

EqualLogic simplicity

http://freeversing.com/?tag=dell-equallogic

Today is an excellent example of the Equallogic platform handling an event failure, dispatching notifications and self-healing.

LeftHand, how to write to a snapshot

http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1307632541976+28353475&threadId=1482976

I'm a relative newbie to working with the P4000s so I am cutting my teeth with the VSA appliance.

I am testing how snaphots work, and I have successfully taken and connected to the snapshot by adding in the new ISCSI name of the snapshotted volume in the windows iscsi initiator. I have assigned the server read/write access as well, and the disk is available in computer management etc. All good, however when i try to write a file to the snapshotted disk, I get an access denied error. I've done a google, and some folk say snapshots are read only, but I am confused by the fact that I can assign a server read/write to access to the snapshot, this implies that I should be able to write to it!

Have I done something wrong or is this the way it works. And if so, is there a sneaky way I can get write access to the snapshot?

LH a question on how to setup

http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=288695&tstart=120

So my question is ... how can I make my P4000 available on the normal network for monitoring and management purposes while storage traffic remains on the separate storage network ?

I've tried using the built-in 1GBit NIC's in the Storage nodes, connecting them to the normal network, but then I start loosing connectivity to the storage cluster as it doesn't seem to like working on two different sub-nets.

Has anyone got experience with this kind of scenario ?

Any help is really appreciated.

An White paper commisioned by HP for the P4000 (left hand) SAN

http://www.scribd.com/doc/57020729/4AA2-7788ENW



Value of Adding Nodes Online via Storage Clustering
Eighty percent of the users interviewed were actively using this ability with extremely good—and impressive—results that garnered much positive commentary:
 “Prior to the P4000, this took 3-4 days of effort, now it’s just 2 minutes (this happens 4-5 times per year).”
 “We had 2 FTEs before—so this alone saves us one of those and contributes probably $100,000 in cost savings in terms of the uptime; not to mention the 60 or so hours of administration time saved. Our prior approach took at least a month to upgrade, plus overtime, plus downtime … and we were managing a far smaller capacity than now.”
 A slightly more conservative user employs the feature, but “only after-hours, to be ultra safe;” it used to take 4 hours before the P4000 and now takes “minutes.”
 Although only done twice in four years, the approach without the P4000 capability took three weekends of 1 FTE to migrate 5 TB (11 volumes) “and of course, that was just moving the data; the device would be down.” Now it “can be migrated in minutes with a simple point and click—it’s never offline and there’s no overtime.”
White Paper: Business and Operational Benefits Achieved with HP P4000 SANs 9
© 2010, Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
 “Before it took at least a day and now it’s minutes.”
 One user spoke of the social convenience (staff “not having to pull all-nighters”) and “extreme confidence” with the online upgrades; saving the overtime was nice, but the improved reliability for customers was excellent. The user also pointed out that the online upgrade saved not just the time of the upgrade itself, but also the three or four days of planning it used to need beforehand.



Value of Thin Provisioning
The use of thin provisioning fell into two distinct camps:
1) Those few users that either barely or did not use thin provisioning at all.
a. One user said it was “not comfortable” and “feels that it’s even less management effort to not try to use it.”
2) The majority, however, do use thin provisioning extensively; on average for around 80% of their volumes. Some examples of individual experiences are:
a. Saving 25% capacity (lower than might be expected because they used to manually over-provision in any case).
b. Saves or reclaims about 40% of capacity; while readers will need to figure their own dollar value, for this user it equated to $50-60,000 per annum.
c. Two users estimated saving a week’s worth of FTE time per year.
d. Saving 50% capacity through reclamation and deferring purchases, said one user, while another estimated 30-40% savings.
e. “Really easy and really quick” was the succinct summary from one customer.

An interesting possible development for LH vars

http://www.thevarguy.com/2011/06/02/scale-computing-looking-for-a-few-good-unhappy-hp-vars/

Scale Computing is questioning HP’s commitment to smaller VARs, since it believes the new changes could cause unnecessary problems or hurdles.

A fairly unhappy LH customer

From


http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/140475-iscsi-virtual-appliances?page=1#entry-768652


HP P4000 is technically a software SAN (you can buy it as a license, and install it yourself). While they are the only VSA that supports VAAI, I would never deploy one again. Crazy things like it automatically creates a new target for every LUN, use of a single virtual IP for all targets, makes management a pain in the ass. GUI is slow as hell, and its an overpriced linux system that isn't that well built or supported (8 hours after I logged a critical ticket I got a voicemail at 10pm saying "hey we're kinda busy today, give us a call back tomr if your still down").

Interesting post on setting up HP p4000 VSA

http://www.vladan.fr/vmware-srm-hp-p4000-vsa-intricacies/

It sounds like he got his cluster up in a snap!

An interesting LH back and forth

http://forums.citrix.com/message.jspa?messageID=1533492

Try creating a junction instead of copying the files. This worked for me. Delete the folder that you copied and then: From Command Line: C:\>mklink /j "C:\Program Files\Lefthand Networks\CLI" "C:\Program Files\HP\P4000\HP P4000 CLI" Junction created for C:\Program Files\Lefthand Networks\CLI <<===>> C:\Program Files\HP\P4000\HP P4000 CLI

Ronnie Munn Posts: 12

Re: HP LeftHand P4300  Posted: Feb 17, 2011 8:49 AM    in response to: Chris Markovic   0 users found this post useful I have also upgraded my SanIQ to 9.0 Once i did this, it broke my Storage Link Configuration. The problem was the CLIQ. Just Uninstall the 9.0 version of the CLIQ and reinstall 8.x version. The problem is because HP changed the folder path to the executable. Storage Link is looking in the wrong place for the files it needs. 8.x works great with Storage Link

jason cobb Posts: 61

Re: HP LeftHand P4300  Posted: Mar 4, 2011 12:01 PM    in response to: Ronnie Munn   0 users found this post useful The engineering team is currently working on CLiQ/SANiQ 9.0 support and have it mostly working. We are just waiting on XenServer product management to decide if we should release this support or not. I apologize for the delay. Thank you, Jason Cobb

Quick LH question

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1707808

Another EQL award

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/productsOfTheYearCategory/0,294802,sid5_tax317275_ayr2010,00.html

Lefthand SAN question

http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447626+1297290362316+28353475&threadId=1467601

Copied From:

Hi experts and colleagues, 
I have a few quick questions i hope you can help me. I am new to HP/Lefthand. I have a 4 nodes Lefthand p4300 configured in two different clusters ( 2 nodes per clusters) but in the same management group. I have a Virtul manager ip address configured for the first cluster and have all my esx VM hosts connect to the virtual manager ip address. I dont have a virtual manager ip address configured for my second cluster, I connect to the storage in the 2nd cluster via the same virtual manager ip address from the first cluster. should I configure a 2nd virtual manager? I was told the virtual manager should be shut down for failover purpose, is that true? 

The SAN storage is in production now but I want to add FOM for seamless failover. Can I add FOM without interruption to normal operation? 

I am not able to find any documentation on configuring FOM and I only see an option to install FOM with a VM image. Can FOM be installed in a physical server? 

Thanks in advance. Sorry for so many questions. 

Thanks. 


*****


The answers


http://bizsupport1.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01744737/c01744737.pdf

http://bizsupport1.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01800000/c01800000.pdf