.HP LeftHand P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance in an HP BladeSystem environment solution guide (AT459-96002, April 2009)

1 VSA requirements
Before beginning the software installation, ensure that the ESX Server meets the following requirements:
• Available drive space of up to 10 TB per VSA
• 1, 2 or 4GB of memory reserved depending on the VSA disk capacity
Table 2 Memory requirements
Minimum required memoryTotal capacity of all installed disks
384MBLess than 500GB
1GB500GB — 4.5TB
2GB4.5TB — 9TB
3GB9TB — 10TB
• Two full CPU cores available
• A Gigabit Ethernet or internal network environment
See the list below for additional information:
• You must designate a host name for the VSA.
• Plan the network configuration, including an IP address, subnet mask, and gateway for the
VSA, or use DHCP.
NOTE:
The use of DHCP is not recommended for VSA implementations.
• Have a virtual switch comprised of dual Gigabit Ethernet or more. Providing network redundancy
and greater bandwidth improves both performance and reliability.
• Ensure the ethernet or network environment is located on the same virtual switch as the
VMkernel network used for iSCSI traffic. This allows for a portion of iSCSI I/O to be served
directly from the VSA to the iSCSI initiator without using a physical network.
• Ensure the ethernet or network environment is on a virtual switch that is separate from the
VMkernel network used for VMotion. This prevents VMotion traffic and VSA I/O traffic from
interfering with each other and affecting performance.
• The server is configured to automatically start before any other virtual machines, when the ESX
Server on which it resides is started. This ensures that the VSA is brought back online as soon as
possible to automatically re-join its SAN/IQ cluster.
HP LeftHand P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance in an HP BladeSystem environment solution guide 11