User guide

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

• Pre-install the VMs (for example, as VMs installed on a VMDK on a SAN datastore or a local datastore).

Note

Refer to Configuring EVA arrays for more information on placing VMs.

The procedure is as follows:

1. Identify which HBAs are present on the vSphere server by issuing the following command:

[root@lx100 ~]# lspci | grep "Fibre Channel"

This command provides a quick view of the HBAs in your system and their respective PCI hardware IDs. Alternatively,

you can view HBAs via the vSphere Client; however, PCI hardware IDs would not be shown.

The output to the above command is similar to that shown in Figure E-2.

Figure E-2. HBAs present on the vSphere server

10:00.0 Fibre Channel: QLogic Corp ISP2432-based 4Gb Fibre Channel to PCI Express HBA (rev 02)

10:00.1 Fibre Channel: QLogic Corp ISP2432-based 4Gb Fibre Channel to PCI Express HBA (rev 02)

1b:00.0 Fibre Channel: QLogic Corp ISP2532-based 8Gb Fibre Channel to PCI Express HBA (rev 02)

1b:00.1 Fibre Channel: QLogic Corp ISP2532-based 8Gb Fibre Channel to PCI Express HBA (rev 02)

21:00.0 Fibre Channel: Emulex Corporation LPe12000 8Gb Fibre Channel Host Adapter (rev 03)

21:00.1 Fibre Channel: Emulex Corporation LPe12000 8Gb Fibre Channel Host Adapter (rev 03)

2. Access the vSphere host through vSphere Client. Select the Configuration tab and click on Advanced Settings in the

Hardware section, as shown in Figure E-3, to determine if passthrough (VMDirectPath) is supported.

Figure E-3. Indicating that no devices have been enabled for VMDirectPath

The screen displays a warning indicating that configuring a device for VMDirectPath will render that device unusable by

vSphere.

In this example, no devices are currently enabled for VMDirectPath I/O.

However, if your server hardware does not support Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) or AMD

Extended Page Tables (EPT), Nested Page Tables (NPT), and Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI), it cannot support

VMDirectPath. In this case, the Advanced Settings screen would be similar to that shown in Figure E-4, which indicates

that the host does not support VMDirectPath.