Installation guide

7
Note
To locate and download the latest software and firmware update for your
P2000, go to http://www.hp.com/go/p2000. Select Models – select your
product P2000 G3 MSA Fibre Channel Dual Controller SFF Array
System – select HP Support & Drivers, then select Download drivers
and software. Also you can get support information for any HP products by
going to http://www.hp.com/go/support.
The P2000 Storage Management Utility (SMU) is a web-based application for configuring, monitoring, and
managing the storage system. Within the SMU the Provisioning Wizard will help you create the vdisk layout with
volumes and will map the volumes to the DL980 server. On the server itself, Oracle Automatic Storage Management
(ASM) will allocate the LUNs to a diskgroup. Before using this wizard, read the documentation and SMU reference
guidelines to learn about vdisks, volumes, and LUN mapping. A command line interface is also available and can be
used for scripting and bulk management.
A vdisk is a “virtual” disk that is composed of one or more physical hard drives, and has the combined capacity of
those disks. The number of disks that a vdisk can contain is determined by its RAID level. In a dual-controller P2000
system, when a vdisk is created the system automatically assigns the owner to balance the number of vdisks each
controller owns. Typically it does not matter which controller owns a vdisk. In a dual-controller system, when a
controller fails, the partner controller assumes temporary ownership of the failed controller’s vdisks and resources.
When a fault-tolerant cabling configuration is used to connect the controllers to FC SAN switches and hosts, both
controllers’ LUNs are accessible through the partner.
When you create the vdisks select the 64KB chunk size. The chunk size is the amount of contiguous data that is
written to a disk before moving to the next disk. The 64KB chunk size provided the best overall performance in our
reference configuration testing. That means the requests would be spread evenly over all of the disks, which is good
for performance.
When you create a vdisk you also create volumes within it. A volume is a logical unit number (LUN) of a vdisk, and
can be mapped to controller host ports for access by hosts. A LUN identifies a mapped volume to the DL980. The
storage system presents only volumes, not vdisks, to hosts.
Some best practices to keep in mind for creating vdisks include:
 To maximize capacity, use disks of similar size.
 For greatest reliability, use disks of the same size and rotational speed.
 The optimal configuration for the tested BI workload was to create 4 vdisks of 6 physical drives each for every
24-disk P2000 array.
 For maximum use of a dual-controller system’s resources, the vdisks for each array should be evenly divided
between the controllers.
 For a fault-tolerant configuration, configure the vdisks with write-back caching.
For our reference configuration, each P2000 array was divided into four vdisks with six 146GB drives each. The
vdisks were configured for RAID10 and a 64KB chuck size. The vdisks were named A1, A2, B1, B2 so as to simplify
the mapping of the vdisks to the fibre channel ports of the P2000 controllers. A single 400GB volume was created
from each vdisk to be used for the Oracle database (see example in figure 2). This provided a total of 48 times
400GB volumes (19TB database storage) for presentation to the DL980 where Oracle ASM is used to layout the
filesystem so we can then create the database. The remaining 1.9TB of storage space (40 GB unallocated from each
vdisk) was reserved for flat files, staging or other application requirements. Figure 1 shows an example of one of the
four vdisk configurations with the name A1 using 6 disks striped with mirroring within a single P2000 array. Another
way of creating the storage layout is by using command line and scripts.