HP VMA SAN Gateway for VMA-series Memory Arrays - Release Notes

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HP VMA SAN Gateway

for VMA-series Memory Arrays

Release Notes – November 2011

Table of contents

Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 2

Features .......................................................................................................................................... 2

VMA features not initially supported by HP ............................................................................................. 3

Documentation location ........................................................................................................................ 3

Setup and configuration of the VMA SAN Gateway ................................................................................ 3

VMA SAN Gateway hardware configuration ...................................................................................... 3

VMA SAN Gateway software configuration ........................................................................................ 6

SAN connectivity with the VMA SAN Gateway ................................................................................... 7

Configuring and presenting LUNs to connected host servers .................................................................. 8

HP-supported host connectivity with VMA SAN Gateway.......................................................................... 8

Host configuration support matrix ....................................................................................................... 8

Additional platform/OS specific considerations ................................................................................... 9

Supported web browsers with vSHARE GUI .......................................................................................... 12

VMA SAN Gateway: general recommendations and limitations .............................................................. 13

Alignment of data transfer I/O block sizes ........................................................................................ 13

Data layout structure alignment on VMA Array LUNs .......................................................................... 13

Tune application to issue I/Os which are multiple of 4KB ................................................................... 13

Create multiple LUNs for parallelization of I/O for applications .......................................................... 13

LUN 0 of the VMA SAN Gateway ................................................................................................... 13

Currently only 512B sectors are supported ........................................................................................ 14

Tune OS I/O queue depth settings for optimal performance ................................................................ 14

Increased I/O traffic from server reboot might cause reported path offline ............................................ 14

VMA v-commands available with the Gateway CLI ............................................................................. 14

Setting date and time ..................................................................................................................... 14

CLI commands are case sensitive ..................................................................................................... 15

Backing up VMA SAN Gateway configuration for recovery .................................................................... 15

Data backup ..................................................................................................................................... 15

Open known problems ....................................................................................................................... 15

Open source code availability ............................................................................................................. 16

For HP Technical Support .................................................................................................................... 16

In the United States ........................................................................................................................ 16

In other locations ........................................................................................................................... 16

For VMA drivers and firmware downloads ............................................................................................ 16

For more information .......................................................................................................................... 17

Summary of content (17 pages)

PAGE 1
HP VMA SAN Gateway for VMA-series Memory Arrays Release Notes – November 2011 Table of contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 2 Features .......................................................................................................................................... 2 VMA features not initially supported by HP ......................................................................
PAGE 2
Introduction The VMA SAN Gateway provides additional scale of connectivity and availability for connecting host servers using industry standard Fibre Channel to VMA-series Memory Arrays. The VMA SAN Gateway acts as a storage controller that provides FC connectivity. The VMA SAN Gateway requires a FC SAN switch between the gateway and the connecting servers.
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VMA features not initially supported by HP The VMA-series memory arrays (VMA) and vSHARE OE are manufactured by Violin Memory. Not all features and configurations possible with the VMA-series arrays and VMA SAN gateway have been fully tested to the expected level from HP and are considered unsupported until a later time.
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Figure 2: VMA SAN Gateway – back view (P/N AM465A) The FC HBA ports in the VMA SAN Gateway act as storage target ports which are connected to a FC SAN Switch to provide host initiator port connectivity. The VMA SAN Gateway is only supported with SAN Fabric attach; FC direct attach from a server FC port to a FC port on the gateway is not supported.
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Figure 3: VMA-series Memory Array – back view showing PCIe ports The following figures show how to properly insert the VMA PCIe Pass-Thru and Optional 8Gb FC dual port adapters. If you specify factory integration (option 0D1) with your order of a VMA SAN Gateway and one or two VMA-series Memory Arrays, the resulting racked and shipped configuration will appear as depicted below.
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Figure 5: Correct connections for two VMA-series Memory Arrays to one VMA SAN Gateway VMA SAN Gateway software configuration Please take time to review the HP VMA SAN Gateway Installation and User Guide to become familiar with the available commands and features. On first login to the VMA SAN Gateway, you will be prompted if you want to run the setup wizard.
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Note that the title of Chapter 3, Configuring and Managing Clusters, in the HP VMA SAN Gateway Installation and User Guide is somewhat misleading. The VMA SAN Gateway operating environment has the ability to configure gateways in a master and slave(s) relationship to provide for single point of management and monitoring of all member nodes.
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Table 1. VMA SAN Gateway FC target port naming. VMA SAN Gateway HBA I/O Slot # Target Port Name Left Port Right Port 2 hba-a1 hba-a2 3 hba-b1 hba-b2 5 (if present) hba-c1 hba-c2 6 (if present) hba-d1 hba-d2 Note that only the FC HBAs installed in I/O slots #2 and #3 come with the default configuration of the VMA SAN Gateway. The FC target HBAs in I/O slots #5 and #6 are optional and will only be present if ordered as add-on components, P/N AJ764A.
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   ProLiant DL980 G7 running RHEL 5.7 ProLiant DL980 G7 running SLES 11 SP1 ProLiant DL980 G7 running Windows Server 2008 R2 & R2 SP1 For additional details about supported servers, operating systems and FC HBAs, see the following table: Table 2. VMA SAN Gateway support matrix. Server Platform Operating System & Version Platform Firmware FC HBAs FC Driver Version FC SAN Switches BL8x0c i2 HP-UX 11i v3 update 9 (fusion 1109) or newer K26.
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SAN Gateway only supports the de facto standard Peripheral Device Addressing (PDA) mode. Legacy mode requires Volume Set Addressing (VSA) for targets which support greater than 8 LUNs (LUN IDs 0-7) attached. The „Agile View‟ of HP-UX 11i v3 Mass Storage Stack supports both PDA and VSA addressing modes for storage devices and also provides I/O and connectivity support well beyond 11i v2 limits.
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Recommended Multipath Settings For Linux environments, it is recommended to change from the default settings for multipathing. For heavily loaded I/O environments, such as with the VMA SAN Gateway, it has proven to be more efficient to use the „tur‟ checker method instead of the „readsector0‟ or „directio‟ alternatives to check the health of lunpaths.
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3. Check the box for MPIO and install. 4. Reboot the server to initialize MPIO and claim devices. Verify that MPIO has correctly identified the LUNs presented by the VMA SAN Gateway with the following steps: 1. Click: START -> Administrative Tools -> MPIO 2. Under the MPIO Devices tab, verify that there is a Device Hardware ID entry for „VIOLIN SAN ARRAY „ in the list of IDs.
PAGE 13
VMA SAN Gateway: general recommendations and limitations The following are general recommendations for getting optimal performance with the HP VMA SAN Gateway and connected HP VMA-series Memory Arrays. Alignment of data transfer I/O block sizes The internal flash addressing of the VMA is based on 4K (4096) byte boundaries. Read or write requests that do not begin on a 4KB aligned target block address or are of I/O sizes not a multiple of 4KB might suffer a performance impact.
PAGE 14
Currently only 512B sectors are supported While the VMA SAN Gateway will allow creation of LUNs with either a 512B or 4KB sector size, only 512B sector size has been fully tested and supported with the gateway. LUNs using 4KB sectors have not been fully validated and are not considered supported by HP at this time. Tune OS I/O queue depth settings for optimal performance Refer to and follow the guidelines for setting OS specific I/O queue depth for I/O to the VMA SAN Gateway.
PAGE 15
CLI commands are case sensitive All CLI commands are case sensitive and usually are all lower case. CLI commands are documented in appendices of the user manuals. Backing up VMA SAN Gateway configuration for recovery For disaster recovery of the VMA SAN Gateway configuration file, you can create a copy of the gateway configuration file and upload it to a production or maintenance server to be included in the regular data backup of that server.
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logged and e-mail notification indicating that a process was killed. When the gateway is restarted, the gateway will re-export the LUNs. Web browser based vSHARE GUI might log out due to inactivity even though there is activity. LUN presentation and export rules need to be changed to reflect initiator port changes if a host HBA fails, is removed or is replaced.
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For more information To read more about the HP VMA-series Memory Arrays and VMA SAN Gateway, go to: www.hp.com/go/vma Share with colleagues © Copyright 2011 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty.