9.5 HP P4000 VSA Installation and Configuration Guide

• Locating VSAs that are running managers on separate physical platforms

If VSAs are running managers, ensure that those VSAs reside on separate physical platforms.

Otherwise, rebooting a single physical platform could cause a loss of quorum in the

management group.

• Managing the performance impact of mixing platforms in clusters

Mixing VSAs and physical platforms in a cluster yields unpredictable performance. Mixing

VSAs built from different hardware in the same cluster also yields unpredictable performance.

Typically the overall performance of the cluster is close to the aggregate average of the storage

systems in the cluster.

Additionally, you may perceive performance degradation if a faster VSA fails, thereby causing

volumes to fail over to a slower VSA. Such performance degradation is normal in a mixed

cluster.

Adding storage capacity to a VSA

Add storage capacity to a VSA by adding up to 4 additional virtual disks for a total of 5 disks.

Note that the additional capacity on the VSA will operate according the same rules for physical

storage systems in a cluster; that is, the VSA will operate at a capacity equal to that of the smallest

capacity storage system in the cluster.

The following steps describe how to add disks after the VSA has been added to a management

group and cluster. However, you can add the disks to the VSA when you first configure it, before

you use it for clustered storage.

Create additional disks

Create up to 4 additional disks for a VSA.

Requirements

• Minimum disk size - 5 GB

• Maximum disk size - 2047 GB for ESX, 2040 GB for Hyper-V

• Created sequentially as follows:

ESX Server — from SCSI 1:1 through SCSI 1:4. This assumes that the first disk has already

been created and assigned to SCSI 1:0.

◦

◦ Hyper-V — Add up to four additional disks to SCSI Controller 0, location 1 through 4.

This assumes that the first disk has already been created in SCSI Controller 0, location

Table 10 Memory requirements for VSA disks

Requires at least this much memoryTotal capacity of all installed disks

ESX Server

• 384 MB• 500 GB

• •500 GB to 4.5 TB 1 GB

•• 2 GB4.5 TB to 9 TB

• •9 TB to 10 TB 3 GB

Hyper-V

• 1 GB• 500 GB up to, but less than 4.5 TB

• •4.5 TB up to, but less than 9 TB 2 GB

•• 3 GB9 TB up to, but less than 10 TB

Adding storage capacity to a VSA 23