User guide

Technical white paper | HP Enterprise Virtual Array Storage and VMware vSphere 4.x and 5.x configuration best practices

Executive summary

The HP Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) storage

family has been designed for mid-range and enterprise customers with

critical requirements to improve storage utilization and scalability. EVA arrays can fulfill application-specific demands for

transactional I/O performance, while supporting easy capacity expansion, instantaneous replication, and simplified storage

administration.

The combination of an EVA array, HP Command View EVA software and VMware vSphere 4.x and 5.x provides a

comprehensive solution that can simplify management and maximize the performance of a vSphere infrastructure.

HP continues to develop and improve best practices for deploying HP EVA Storage arrays with vSphere 4.x and 5.x. This

white paper describes a broad range of best practices for a Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI implementation; Fibre Channel over

Ethernet (FCoE) implementation is outside the scope of this paper.

Target audience: vSphere and SAN administrators that are familiar with the vSphere infrastructure and virtual storage

features, the EVA array family, and Command View EVA.

DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY

This document may contain the following HP or other software: XML, CLI statements, scripts, parameter files. These are

provided as a courtesy, free of charge, “AS-IS” by Hewlett-Packard Company (“HP”). HP shall have no obligation to maintain

or support this software. HP MAKES NO EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTY OF ANY KIND REGARDING THIS SOFTWARE

INCLUDING ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE OR NON-

INFRINGEMENT. HP SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL

DAMAGES, WHETHER BASED ON CONTRACT, TORT OR ANY OTHER LEGAL THEORY, IN CONNECTION WITH OR ARISING

OUT OF THE FURNISHING, PERFORMANCE OR USE OF THIS SOFTWARE.

The challenges

With vSphere 5, VMware continues to stretch the boundaries of scalability through features that include:

• Support for 1TB of RAM per virtual machine (VM)

• Support for 32 virtual CPUs per VM

• Support for 160 cores for host server

• High-performance SCSI virtual adapter

• Support for up to 512 VMs on a single ESX host

• Modular storage stack that is closely integrated with the particular storage array

For administrators, this feature-packed hypervisor raises several questions about effectively configuring, tuning and

deploying vSphere 4.x and 5.x in their respective SANs such as:

• What is the optimal storage configuration?

• Which I/O path policy is the most appropriate?

• How to simplify storage management, even in a complex environment with multiple storage systems?

• How to effectively monitor the SAN in order to quickly make adjustments when needed?

Successfully addressing these challenges is imperative if you wish to maximize the return on investment (ROI) for your SAN

while continuing to meet the changing needs of the business. To help you achieve these goals, this paper presents best

practices for configuring, tuning, and deploying a vSphere SAN environment.

Key concepts and features

This section introduces key concepts and features associated with the successful configuration, tuning, and deployment of a

vSphere SAN environment. These include Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) compliance, virtual disk (Vdisk) controller

ownership and access, and Vdisk follow-over.

All references in this document to HP EVA Storage arrays imply classic HP EVA Storage arrays and the rebranded HP EVA P6000 Storage.

Depending on host server resources