HP P4000 LeftHand SAN New Feature Summary SAN/iQ 9.5

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA3-8472ENW.pdf


SAN/iQ 9.5 will expand Application Integration functionality of the P4000 to include VMware integrated snapshots.
The existing HP P4000 Windows Solution Pack is replaced by the new Application Integration Solution Pack which
includes the Application Aware Snapshot Manager.  This tool allows users to take Application Aware snapshots for
both VMware and Windows volumes and create application consistent, point in time copies for speedy and reliable
recovery of VMs.

HP P4000: Management Group Maintenance Mode, Volumes Not Available, and Cache Status Corrupt

How to resolve the problem is in the link below:

Due to electrical maintenance work, a 2 node P4000 SAN cluster with failover manager, needed to be completely powered down, and this was done in the correct order – hosts accessing the SAN powered down first, then the SAN was shut down via the “Shut Down Management Group...” option in the HP StorageWorks P4000 Centralized Management Console (CMC).

Something went wrong when the SAN was powered back up, and the result was:

i: The Management Group was operating in Maintenance Mode.

ii: All the volumes (including the Network RAID tolerant volumes) had a status of 'Not Available'.

iii: One of the Storage Systems had a status of Failed

http://cosonok.blogspot.com/2012/04/hp-p4000-management-group-maintenance.html

Interesting post about LH HP4000 features

http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Around-the-Storage-Block-Blog/HP-LeftHand-P4000-Peer-Motion-demo/ba-p/108913

Peer Motion is HP’s data migration technology which offers HP LeftHand users two simple and flexible methods of moving data volumes within a LeftHand SAN. Those methods are volume migration and cluster swap.  Volume Migration and Cluster Swap employ storage federated software, to transparently move application workloads between tiers of data storage and/or storage clusters in a LeftHand environment. Peer Motion on HP LeftHand supports all P4000 storage models - spanning from the P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) to the midrange and high performance P4000 storage systems.

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!

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.

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.