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Technical white paper

HP MSA 1040/2040

Best practices

Table of contents

About this document ............................................................................................................................................................ 3

Intended audience ................................................................................................................................................................. 3

Prerequisites .......................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Related documentation ........................................................................................................................................................ 3

Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................................ 4

Terminology ........................................................................................................................................................................... 5

General best practices .......................................................................................................................................................... 6

Use version 3 of the Storage Management Utility ........................................................................................................ 6

Become familiar with the array by reading the manuals ............................................................................................. 6

Stay current on firmware ................................................................................................................................................. 6

Use tested and supported configurations ..................................................................................................................... 6

Understand what a host is from the array perspective ............................................................................................... 7

Rename hosts to a user friendly name .......................................................................................................................... 7

Disk Group initialization for Linear Storage ................................................................................................................... 8

Best practice for monitoring array health .......................................................................................................................... 8

Configure email, SNMP, and Syslog notifications ......................................................................................................... 8

Setting the notification level for email, SNMP, and Syslog .......................................................................................... 9

Sign up for proactive notifications for the HP MSA 1040/2040 array........................................................................ 9

Best practices for provisioning storage on the HP MSA 1040/2040 ........................................................................... 10

Thin Provisioning ............................................................................................................................................................ 10

Pool Balancing ................................................................................................................................................................ 11

Tiering .............................................................................................................................................................................. 13

Best practices when choosing drives for HP MSA 1040/2040 storage ...................................................................... 14

Drive types ...................................................................................................................................................................... 14

Best practices to improve availability .............................................................................................................................. 15

Volume mapping ............................................................................................................................................................ 15

Redundant paths ............................................................................................................................................................ 15

Multipath software ......................................................................................................................................................... 15

Dual power supplies ...................................................................................................................................................... 19

Dual controllers .............................................................................................................................................................. 19

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Summary of content (33 pages)

PAGE 1
Technical white paper HP MSA 1040/2040 Best practices Table of contents About this document ............................................................................................................................................................3 Intended audience.................................................................................................................................................................3 Prerequisites ..................................................................
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Reverse cabling of expansion enclosures................................................................................................................... 19 Create Disk Groups across expansion enclosures ..................................................................................................... 19 Drive sparing ..................................................................................................................................................
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 About this document This white paper highlights the best practices for optimizing the HP MSA 1040/2040, and should be used in conjunction with other HP Modular Smart Array (MSA) manuals. MSA technical user documentations can be found at hp.com/go/msa1040 and hp.com/go/msa2040. Intended audience This white paper is intended for HP MSA 1040/2040 administrators with previous storage area network (SAN) knowledge.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Introduction The HP MSA 1040 is designed for entry-level market needs featuring 8Gb Fibre Channel, 1GbE, and 10GbE iSCSI protocols. The MSA 1040 arrays leverages new 4th-generation controller architecture with a new processor, 2-host ports per controller and 4GB cache per controller.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Terminology Virtual Disk (Vdisk): The Vdisk nomenclature is being replaced by Disk Group. In the Linear Storage and in the Storage Management Utility (SMU) Version 2 you will still see references to Vdisk; in the Virtual Storage and the SMU Version 3 you will see Disk Group. Vdisk and Disk Group are essentially the same.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Note The MSA 1040 only supports the Standard and Archive Tiers, and requires a license to enable Sub-LUN Tiering and other Virtual Storage features such as Thin Provisioning. Read Cache: Read Cache is an extension of the controller cache. Read Cache allows a lower cost way to get performance improvements from SSD drives. Sub-LUN Tiering: Sub-LUN Tiering is a technology that allows for the automatic movement of data between storage tiers based on access trends.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Understand what a host is from the array perspective An initiator is analogous to an external port on a host bus adapter (HBA). An initiator port does not equate to a physical server, but rather a unique connection on that server. For example, a dual port FC HBA has two ports and therefore there are two unique initiators, and the array will show two separate initiators for that HBA. With the new GL200 firmware, there is a new definition for host.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Disk Group initialization for Linear Storage During the creation of a Disk Group for Linear Storage, the user has the option to create a Disk Group in online mode (default) or offline mode. If the “online initialization” option is enabled, you can use the Disk Group while it is initializing. Online initialization takes more time because parity initialization is used during the process to initialize the Disk Group.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 To configure these settings in the SMU, click Home -> Action -> Set Up Notifications. Enter the correct information for email, SNMP, and Syslog. See Figure 4. Figure 3. Setting Up Management services Figure 4.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Best practices for provisioning storage on the HP MSA 1040/2040 The release of the GL200 firmware for the MSA1040/2040 introduces virtual storage features such as Thin Provisioning and Sub-LUN Tiering. The section below will assist in the best methods for optimizing these features for the MSA 1040/2040. Thin Provisioning Thin Provisioning is a storage allocation scheme that automatically allocates storage as your applications need it.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Figure 6. Disabling the overcommit of the pool Thresholds and Notifications If you use Thin Provisioning, monitor space consumption and set notification thresholds appropriately for the rate of storage consumption. The thresholds and notifications below can help determine when more storage needs to be added. Users with a manage role can view and change settings that affect the thresholds and corresponding notifications for each storage pool.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Determining the pool space can easily be viewed in V3 of the SMU. Simply navigate to ‘Pools’ and click the name of the pool. Viewing the performance of the pools or Virtual Disk Groups can also assist in determining where to place the Archive Tier space. From V3 of the SMU, navigate to ‘Performance’ then click ‘Virtual Pools’ from the ‘Show:’ drop-down box. Next, click the pool and for real time data, click ‘Show Data’.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Tiering A Tier is defined by the disk type in the Virtual Disk Groups. • Performance Tier contains SSDs • Standard Tier contains 10K RPM/15K RPM Enterprise SAS drives • Archive Tier contains MDL SAS 7.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 For optimal write performance, parity based disk groups (RAID 5 and RAID 6) should be created with “The Power of 2” method. This method means that the number of data (non-parity) drives contained in a disk group should be a power of 2. See the chart below.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Best practices to improve availability There are many methods to improve availability when using the HP MSA 1040/2040 array. High availability is always advisable to protect your assets in the event of a device failure. Outlined below are some options that will help you in the event of a failure. Volume mapping Using volume mapping correctly can provide high availability from the hosts to the array.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Table 1.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Workaround: If you are using MPIO with a large number of LUNs, edit your registry settings so that HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\mpio\Parameters\PDORemovePeriod is set to a higher value. • If you are using a Fibre Channel connection to a Windows server running MPIO, use a value of 90 seconds. • If you are using an iSCSI connection to a Windows server running MPIO, use a value of 300 seconds.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Click the MPIO tab to view the MPIO property sheet, which enables you to view or change the load balance policy and view the number of paths and their status. The Details tab shows additional parameters.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Dual power supplies The HP MSA 1040/2040 chassis and supported expansion enclosures ship with dual power supplies. At a minimum, connect both power supplies in all enclosures. For the highest level of availability, connect the power supplies to separate power sources. Dual controllers The HP MSA 2040 can be purchased as a single or dual controller system; the HP MSA 1040 is sold only as a dual controller system.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Drive sparing Drive sparing, sometimes referred to as hot spares, is recommended to help protect data in the event of a disk failure in a fault tolerant Disk Group (RAID 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, or 50) configuration. In the event of a disk failure, the array automatically attempts to reconstruct the data from the failed drive to a compatible spare. A compatible spare is defined as a drive that has sufficient capacity to replace the failed disk and is the same media type (i.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Implement Remote Snap replication with Linear Storage The HP MSA 1040/2040 storage system Remote Snap feature is a form of asynchronous replication that replicates blocklevel data from a volume on a local system to a volume on the same system or on a second independent system. The second system may be at the same location as the first, or it may be located at a remote site. Best practice is to implement Remote Snap replication for disaster recovery.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 When write-back cache is disabled, write-through becomes the cache-writing strategy. Using write-through cache, the controller writes the data to the disks before signaling the host operating system that the process is complete. Writethrough cache has lower write operation and throughput performance than write-back, but all data is written to non-volatile storage before confirmation to the host.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Table 2.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Fastest throughput optimization The following guidelines list the general best practices to follow when configuring your storage system for fastest throughput: • Host ports should be configured to match the highest speed your infrastructure supports. • Disk Groups should be balanced between the two controllers. • Disk drives should be balanced between the two controllers.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Table 3.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Use SSDs for randomly accessed data The use of SSDs can greatly enhance the performance of the array. Since there are no moving parts in the drives, data that is random in nature can be accessed much faster. Data such as database indexes and TempDB files would best be placed on a volume made from an SSD based Disk Group since this type of data is accessed randomly.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Note: You can have SSDs in a fault tolerant Disk Group as a Performance Tier or as a non-fault tolerant (up to 2 disks) Disk Group as Read Cache. But neither pool can have both a Performance Tier and a Read Cache. For example, pool A can have a Performance Tier and pool B can have a Read Cache. SSD wear gauge SSDs have a limited number of times they can be written and erased due to the memory cells on the drives.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Best practices for Disk Group expansion With the ever changing storage needs seen in the world today, there comes a time when storage space gets exhausted quickly. The HP MSA 1040/2040 gives you the option to grow the size of a LUN to keep up with your dynamic storage needs. A Disk Group expansion allows you to grow the size of a Disk Group in order to expand an existing volume or create volumes from the newly available space on the Disk Group.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Follow the procedure below. 1. Backup the current data from the existing Disk Group. 2. Using the WBI or CLI, start the Disk Group expansion. 3. Monitor the Disk Group expansion percentage complete. Note Once a Disk Group expansion initiates it will continue until completion or until the Disk Group is deleted.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Re-create the Disk Group with additional capacity and restore data This method is the easiest and fastest method for adding additional capacity to a Disk Group. The online Disk Group initialization allows a user to access the Disk Group almost immediately and will complete quicker than the expansion process on a Disk Group that is also servicing data requests.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 MSA 1040/2040 disk drive firmware update best practices • Disk drive upgrades on the HP MSA 1040/2040 storage systems is an offline process. All host and array I/O must be stopped prior to the upgrade. • If the drive is in a Disk Group, verify that it is not being initialized, expanded, reconstructed, verified, or scrubbed. If any of these tasks is in progress, before performing the update wait for the task to complete or terminate it.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Figure 9. MSA 2040 SAN iSCSI Network IP address scheme for the controller pair The MSA 2040 SAN controller in iSCSI configurations or the MSA 1040 iSCSI should have ports on each controller in the same subnets to enable preferred path failover. The suggested means of doing this is to vertically combine ports into subnets. See examples below. Example with a netmask of 255.255.255.0: MSA 2040 SAN: Controller A port 1: 10.10.10.100 Controller A port 2: 10.11.10.
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Technical white paper | HP MSA 1040/2040 Summary HP MSA 1040/2040 administrators should determine the appropriate levels of fault tolerance and performance that best suits their needs. Understanding the workloads and environment for the MSA SAN is also important. Following the configuration options listed in this paper can help optimize the HP MSA 1040/2040 array accordingly. Learn more at hp.com/go/MSA Sign up for updates hp.