Setting up mapping and Lun on HP MSA SAN

Hi all

I have purchased some additional storage for our HP MSA2324fc SAN and in the process of mirroring what our consultant setup for us. I am in the process of creating new vdisks and volumes, I have done this part but am stuck on the mappings and lun assignment as I dont full understand how this works. Basically this extra storage is for some of our Virtual machines on VMware ESX4 which are sitting on a NAS datastore. The hope is there new datastore will be on the SAN with the new disks and volumes I am setting up.

Basically I am not sure if mirroring how our first 8 disks are setup is correct way for me to setup the second array of disks. I attach some pictures which hopefully may help to try to understand what I am trying to do. The first picture shows vdisk1 config and the second pictures is the config I am setting up.
I have created 3 new datastores with the same naming conventions which were used just substituting vdisk1 with vdisk2.

I am stuck at the mapping section, there is an option in the config where I have to define if I want default mapping or explicit mapping. I noticed that the consultant has done explicit mapping. Should I be using this too? I assume the LUN mask the consultant used were from 1 to 3 on each datastore on vdisk1. On vdisk2_datastore1 I have used LUN 4 and for datastore2 will use 5 and so on.

I also noticed that the Ports setup on vdisk1 are different from mine, does anyone know if this is because I have chosen type as default rather than explicit? Do the ports on vdisk2 datastores need to be exactly the same as the vdisk1 stores?

This setup may make most sense to other members who have HP SANs. If anyone has any experience with LUNS and mappings if someone could advise me if I should just mirror whats been done with vdisk1 or if I should change it slightly. Looking at the best practise procedures on the HP and VMware site is just confusing me more.

I attach 2 pictures to show the differences between the setup which the consultant did and the one I am attempting to do now.

Thanks

attachments:

Setup on vdisk1 – the one which consultant setup
Setup on vdisk2 – the one I am currently setting up

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ranj

I am stuck at the mapping section, there is an option in the config where I have to define if I want default mapping or explicit mapping. I noticed that the consultant has done explicit mapping. Should I be using this too? I assume the LUN mask the consultant used were from 1 to 3 on each datastore on vdisk1. On vdisk2_datastore1 I have used LUN 4 and for datastore2 will use 5 and so on.

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I'm assuming you have 4 ESX hosts, with dual fibre cards? While you may need to only allow a single host access to a LUN with SAN booting, there isn't very much reason to block some servers or ports from having access to both ports of both controllers.

Ideally you want all the LUNs to be seen on all ports for those machines that need access to the contents of the LUNs along with those that may be needed for vmotion etc.

All my servers have access to all LUNs and all ports as your second example is set up. This way any host can run any VM.


If however you have a mixture of Windows/Linux/ESX/Xen hosts accessing this SAN then you may well need to be specific about which LUN is available to which host (although I still see no reason for restricting to any specific ports). Windows for example will destroy the partition info on a VMFS volume the first time it reads it without asking.

Just had a question about combining virtual disks on the SAN.
I have populated the tray with 16 disks and have created 2 vdisk with a total of 6 datastores utilising 15 disks with 1 global hot spare.

I have

vdisk1- 500gb

vdisk2 - 500gb

vdisk3 - 1000gb

vdisk4 - 500gb

vdisk5 - 500gb

vdisk 6 - 1000gb

I now have a windows server utilising a datastore from one of these vdisks buts its near capacity of 500gb and I wanted to combine 2 datastores to give me 1tb.

Am I able to do this via the Storage works web interface?

I do have some data on each datastore. Is there a way for me to keep the data without destroying the vdisk structure?

many thanks