Head of HP-LeftHand Engineering Moves on to Nirvanix Cloud Storage

 Barr joins Nirvanix from HP where he was responsible for managing the entire HP-LeftHand Engineering Organization--over 130 employees worldwide

Equallogic storage causing slow response on vm's

As we had a large number of rather small volumes (15 Gb), these volumes are shuffled around a lot, everytime one of the members is having some more space available. This process could hamper the responsiveness of the array, causing write delays to the VM's and not able to send information to the SAN Headquarters. A solution for this was to bound these small volumes to a single Eql member (on the command line).


http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=302206&tstart=0

NEW: EqualLogic MEModule vSphere V1.1.0

The EqualLogic Multipathing Extension Module (EqualLogic MEM) now provides support for VMware ESXi 5.0 including the following enhancements for those ESXi 5.0 environments: 
- Automatic connection management 
- Automatic load balancing across multiple active paths 
- Increased bandwidth 
- Reduced network latency


From


https://support.equallogic.com/support/download.aspx?id=6442454132

P4000 Move Failover Manager from Cluster

When the HyperV server that hosts the F.O.M. reboots, we lose quorum on the P4000 San Cluster and everything slams shut.

My question is how do I go about moving the Fail Over Manager to another server?

Answer:

either way works.  remove the old and recreate a new FOM on a local disk or export the old and import it back to a local disk... doesn't matter... either way getting that FOM to a local independent disk is correct.

edit #2>   You weren't clear if your VSA system is hardware dedicated or the software VSA... if its software, make sure you don't put one of the VSA nodes on the same system as the FOM since if you lose that hardware you still lose quorum.  IE:  you must have three physical host computers to have a two node SAN and two node hyper-v cluster.  You can make a two-node hyper-v cluster and put one VSA instance on the local storage of each of the hyper-v nodes and you will maintain N+1 redundancy as long as you have a FOM installed on a third hyper-v server (that is using local storage for the FOM as well)

HP P4000 VSA Failover

If we  power off one VSA or the ESX host (where the VSA is running on) it takes  40 Seconds until the Read/Write Request are redirect to the VSA that is  still alive.


http://communities.vmware.com/message/1989506

a little post about the P400 VSA

http://vmbulletin.com/http:/vmbulletin.com/hp-tech-day-2012/

The HP Storage Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) P4000 is Lefthand running in a virtual machine that is completely oblivious to what is running underneath it

Why they like EqualLogic

http://www.itogether.co.uk/2012/02/dell-equallogic-why-we-like-it-and-why-we-think-it-is-easier-to-use-than-competitors-like-emc-and-hp/

If you are looking at Netapp, EMC, or HP or IBM and want to consider Dell EqualLogic – even if you’re not a fan of Dell, try to ignore the badge (or just remove it from the bezel like we can do)

Enable VASA on HP P4000 Lefthand SAN with vSphere 5

http://boerlowie.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/enable-vasa-on-hp-p4000-lefthand-san-with-vsphere-5/

 This allows vSphere to read the capabilities of your underlying SAN storage.  With this information, you can do all kinds of fancy stuff afterwards (Profile-Driven Storage, …)

For HP, it is supported on P4000 (Lefthand), P6000 (EVA) and P9000 (XP).  For VASA to function, you will need to install an additional component from HP called HP Insight Control Storage Module for vCenter.  The current version at moment of writing is 6.3.1.  And yeah, it’s free 

In case you need to gather equallogic logs using the CLI

http://www.interweb.org.uk/2012/02/03/equallogic-ps-series-array-gathering-diagnostic-logs-using-cli/

Abysmal Performance on New CSV

Below might be solution

From

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/storage/f/3775/p/19434433/20042992.aspx

After some more testing with directly attached LUNs, I consulted this document again http://www.equallogic.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=10771 and I think I may have resolved my problems.

As recommended:

• I have disabled autotune on the interfaces in my R710 with:

netsh int tcp set blobal autotuninglevel=disabled

• On the switches I've re-enabled iSCSI optomizations, flow control, and Port Fast on all interfaces.
• I've also renabled Jumbo Frame support on the Broadcom NICs, Switches, and SAN after disabling it for testing.

Before making the switch changes all three LUN types were performing horribly.

discussing hp400 remote copy

P4000 Remote Copy

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/195723-p4000-remote-copy

Thanks John. We're on 9.0 still so can't do the VMware quiescing. We do "proper" backups using Commvault which does quiesce VM's - this is just a last resort "get up and running with something as we have nothing" box we're putting in an off-site location.