HP Integrity VM 4.3 N-Port ID Virtualization - A brief overview

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HP Integrity VM 4.3 N-Port ID Virtualization

A brief overview

Technical white paper

Table of contents

About this document ..................................................................................................................... 2

Intended audience .................................................................................................................... 2

An introduction to NPIV ................................................................................................................. 2

Benefits of NPIV ........................................................................................................................... 4

NPIV dependencies and prerequisites ............................................................................................. 5

Software dependencies ............................................................................................................. 5

Hardware dependencies ............................................................................................................ 5

Verifying that the host can support NPIV ...................................................................................... 5

Limits and limitations ..................................................................................................................... 7

Additional caveats .................................................................................................................... 7

Virtual World Wide Name Management......................................................................................... 8

Using GUID Manager to automatically allocate World Wide Names .............................................. 8

Allocating IDs manually or with third-party products ...................................................................... 8

Specifying an NPIV resource .......................................................................................................... 9

Configuring an NPIV HBA with HP Integrity VM commands ............................................................. 10

hpvmcreate / hpvmmodify—to add an NPIV resource ................................................................. 10

hpvmstatus ............................................................................................................................. 10

hpvmdevmgmt ........................................................................................................................ 11

hpvmmodify—to delete an NPIV resource .................................................................................. 11

hpvmdevinfo—show VM to host device mapping ........................................................................ 11

Setting up a VM to use NPIV HBAs ............................................................................................... 12

Configuring storage for a VM with vHBAs ................................................................................. 12

Identifying vHBAs and LUNs in a VM ........................................................................................ 13

Identifying the VFC Controller’s creation in a virtual environment .................................................. 13

Accessing the NPIV LUNs from EFI ............................................................................................ 14

Migrating VMs with NPIV HBAs ................................................................................................... 15

Known issues ............................................................................................................................. 16

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 19

Summary of content (19 pages)

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HP Integrity VM 4.3 N-Port ID Virtualization A brief overview Technical white paper Table of contents About this document .....................................................................................................................2 Intended audience ....................................................................................................................2 An introduction to NPIV ..............................................................................................................
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About this document The Mission-Critical Converged Infrastructure is the foundation for the next decade of computing. The newest line of HP Integrity systems combines years of trusted HP Integrity resiliency with HP BladeSystem efficiencies.
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Figure 1. NPIV Presentation (two VMs, both with vHBAs) Here, the host has a single physical Fibre Channel HBA with p-WWN as its WWN. Assume the LUNs D1-D6 exist behind this physical Fibre Channel HBA. Using the NPIV feature, two virtual Fibre Channel ports with WWNs v-WWN1 and v-WWN2 are created and assigned to VMs V1 and V2 respectively.
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Benefits of NPIV This chapter lists few benefits of attaching storage through NPIV: • Storage Isolation With legacy shared (AVIO) storage, it is required that the host has access to all the storage that will be presented to the VMs. With NPIV, the targets and LUNs are discovered by the VM directly as soon as a vHBA is created. These LUNs need not be accessible or even visible to the host.
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• Multipath capability in the VM With NPIV, the administrator can now add multiple virtual HBA resources and configure each of them to see the same set of LUNs. This allows for multipathing in the VM, analogous to what can be achieved on standalone systems. NPIV dependencies and prerequisites Software dependencies NPIV support is available for HP Integrity VM 4.3, January 2012 patch release. See the patch release notes at www.hp.com/go/hpux-hpvm-docs.
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The output to fcmsutil is in Figure 2, below. Figure 2. Using fcmsutil to determine whether NPIV is supported.
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Limits and limitations This section captures the various limits that currently apply to the NPIV feature and the few restrictions associated with it. These restrictions may be removed in future releases. Table 1.
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Virtual World Wide Name Management Using GUID Manager to automatically allocate World Wide Names HP recommends installing the GUID Manager product (GUIDMgr), and allowing it to handle WWNs for you automatically. GUID Manager is available for download at www.software.hp.com (enter “GUIDMgr” in the search box). The GUIDMgr provides a mechanism to manage unique WWNs so that the same ID is not re-allocated until freed.
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Specifying an NPIV resource An NPIV resource is specified for VMs using the following format: devicetype:adaptertype:bus,device,vPWWN,vNWWN:storage:device Where: devicetype: This is the virtual device type as seen in the VM. For NPIV this will be “hba” adaptertype: This is the adapter “type” as seen in the VM.
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Configuring an NPIV HBA with HP Integrity VM commands hpvmcreate / hpvmmodify—to add an NPIV resource An NPIV HBA resource can be specified using hpvmcreate when the VM is being created or using hpvmmodify after VM creation. The resource string format presented in the Specifying an NPIV resource section (above) should be used to specify the vHBA.
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hpvmdevmgmt The hpvmdevmgmt command now lists NPIV resources as well as all the information that was previously displayed. Example: The hpvmdevmgmt command run from the host, on which Guest1 was created, displays the following output.
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Setting up a VM to use NPIV HBAs This section describes how to arrange for the provisioning and management of vHBAs. Configuring storage for a VM with vHBAs Storage can be provisioned for a VM with a vHBA either before or after it starts up. In both cases, the VM boots successfully if it has a non-NPIV boot disk configured. If it doesn’t have a boot disk yet, then the VM halts at EFI.
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Identifying vHBAs and LUNs in a VM The ioscan command, when run in a virtual environment, can be used to identify the NPIV HBA from the set of HBAs seen in the VM: # ioscan -kfNd gvsd Class I H/W Path Driver S/W State H/W Type Description ================================================================== ext_bus 0 0/0/0/0 gvsd CLAIMED INTERFACE HPVM AVIO Stor Adapter ext_bus 1 0/0/4/0 gvsd CLAIMED INTERFACE HPVM NPIV Stor Adapter ext_bus 4 0/1/3/0 gvsd CLAIMED INTERFACE HPVM NPIV Stor Adapter Note that the
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Since only V1 is on, and it has only one vHBA, there is only 1 VFC: # ioscan -kfnNd fcd Class I H/W Path Driver S/W State H/W Type Description ===================================================================== fc 0 0/0/0/5/0/0/0 fcd CLAIMED INTERFACE HP 451871-B21 8Gb Dual Port PCIe Fibre Channel Mezzanine (FC Port 1) /dev/fcd0 fc 1 0/0/0/5/0/0/1 fcd CLAIMED INTERFACE HP 451871-B21 8Gb Dual Port PCIe Fibre Channel Mezzanine (FC Port 2) /dev/fcd1 fc 2 0/0/0/5/0/0/1.
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Migrating VMs with NPIV HBAs Starting with the version 4.3, January 2012 patch release, HP Integrity VM supports the migration of VMs that include NPIV HBAs. This includes both online and offline migration. The requirements for migrating a VM are unchanged from previous releases. All resources used by the VM must be available on both the source and target host. If the VM includes NPIV HBAs (vHBAs), then the target host must have a physical Fibre Channel HBA (PFC) to create the vHBA on, such as “/dev/fcd0”.
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Known issues 1. With the default driver configuration, typical virtual environment O/S installations have their boot storage LUNs enumerated and configured in EFI to provide for quicker VM startup times. However, the default driver configuration may not map all the NPIV devices.
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Actions: You need to give your SAN administrator: • The port WWN of the NPIV HBAs where the probe takes too long • The list of FC target WWNs that are responsive and that should be presented to the NPIV HBA • The list of FC target WWNs that are not responsive and that should not be presented to the NPIV HBA With that information, the SAN Administrator should be able to modify FC switch zoning so that the unresponsive FC targets are no longer presented to the NPIV HBA.
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4. Sometimes, a virtual HBA will be stuck in the “INITIALIZING” state. One reason is if the same NPIV WWN is assigned to VMs on different hosts connected to the same Fibre Channel switch, only the first NPIV HBA will be online. All the other virtual HBAs with the same WWN will be stuck in the “INITIALIZING” state. This is because when you start the VM, it will create a vHBA with the port and node WWNs specified when the VM was created or modified. The initial state will be “INITIALIZING”.
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Conclusion With HP Integrity VM's NPIV feature, VMs can now directly address more storage, as well as run applications that need direct access or control of LUNs. NPIV also improves security since the LUNs are directly assigned to, and accessible only by the target VM, so the host or other VMs cannot access the data. NPIV guests can also utilize the full HP-UX multipathing capability, improving the overall availability of the storage.