Category Archives: 3PAR

STOR2RRD to the rescue once again!

Hi,

A few weeks ago we decided to upgrade the firmware on couple of storage systems. Everything seemed to go as planned but after the upgrade we started to notice some latency issues.

I won’t go into detail what was wrong (hint, HDD firmware can cause some serious issues!)- but this tool, STOR2RRD has saved us loads and loads of time – and is as simple as any storage monitoring tool can be. It ain’t perfect but it pointed us in the right direction and helped with getting this specific issue solved.

Cannot recommend this tool enough (and it is free and open source licensed under the GPL v3!).

Bgrds,
Finnur

3PAR support in STOR2RRD

Hello!

I have been a user of STOR2RRD since ~2012 I think. It is a brilliant tool to gather historical performance information on your IBM San Volume Controller based storage (Storwize, SVC, etc).

However, I was looking for a new version few days ago and saw that they have added support for HP 3PAR. They also added support for some HDS storage as well as NetApp. So now, if you cannot cough up dough for [insert your best-of-breed storage management tool here] you might have a cool alternative there 🙂

Of course, this is no replacement for IBM’s TPC products but if you are looking for a single tool to gather performance statistics for your storage arrays and your Brocade fabrics, look no further. This is a very valuable tool to use in daily operations.

Check out their webpage here.

Bgrds,
Finnur

3PAR StoreServ 7000 – Peer Persistence links

Howdy all,

I have been testing a 3PAR Peer Persistence setup using two 3PAR StoreServ 7200c, dual interconnected fabrics between sites and a multi-site VMware cluster (although only one node per site).

It works flawlessly!

Being able to take a array offline (disruptively, removing power to the controller shelf) and the only thing that happens is about ~10 second “delay” (while Peer Persistence fails the VMFS volumes over) for the virtual machines is pretty awesome.

We are still missing VVOL support for replicated volumes (and vMSC) but hopefully it will come later this year.

Here are the most important links on Peer Persistence:
VMware.com (KB article 2055904)
HP’s own Implementing vSphere Metro Storage Cluster using HP 3PAR Peer Persistence

And for a added bonus – HP 3PAR SSMC 2.1 makes Peer Persistence configuration easy as 1-2-3 by Techazine.com

The whole thing takes about 1 hour to configure when you know what you are doing and adding a new volume to the Peer Persistence configuration is a snap.

Bgrds,
FOG

3PAR StoreServ 7000 – Zoning best practices

Howdy all,

Recently I started working with HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 series storage. While installing them I was looking for the best-practice zoning information and seemed to find conflicting information. But after reading this document you see that HP recommends either:

  1. One initiator to one target
  2. One initiator to multiple targets

Check out the section called “FC hosts zoning” and things should be pretty clear! 🙂

Bgrds,
FOG