HP Storage Provisioning Manager (SPM) Version 2.0 User Guide

The main side effect of volume migration, particularly when automated, is that the parent pool will
change as mentioned above and the raid level of the volume may change. As a result, allocated
services that specify ‘UseResource’ or ‘RaidLevel’ requirements may become nonconformant.
Importing a large number of volumes
The SPM catalog can handle tens of thousands of objects. Importing those objects into the catalog
in the first place, however, can be time consuming. SPM supports importing up to 5,000 volumes
at a time for 3PAR arrays. While the overall discovery and import time can vary depending on
volume configuration (particularly if they are presented to hosts) and network latencies, one should
count about half an hour to import 5,000 volumes. It is worth noting that:
1. Subscribed capacity for a pool is calculated as the sum of the subscribed capacity for all
volumes in the pool. This means that re-syncing pools containing a large number of volumes
can be time consuming
2. During discovery of a large number of volumes, Memory requirements increase dramatically;
The system SPM is installed on needs to be sized accordingly
3. Various performance shortcomings in the 3PAR InformOS version 2.3.1MU4 and older make
it impractical to import many volumes. For those systems, it is recommended to upgrade to a
newer firmware (3.1.1 or newer) or make sure SPM manages less than 1,000 volumes.
Unique identification of common provisioning groups (CPG)
3PAR Storage Systems uniquely identify CPGs by their name. While this name is guaranteed to
be unique at any given point in time, it isn’t durable because, outside of SPM, a CPG can be
renamed or worse deleted and replaced by a new CPG carrying the same name. While renaming
CPGs or “recycling CPG names should be avoided if at all possible, such event can be remedied
manually, using the SPM GUI.
In the event a CPG was renamed, the storage administrator should:
1. discover and import the renamed CPG (i.e. a pool in SPM terminology), which SPM believes
is new
2. Re-sync all volumes in the CPG – This will cause SPM to move all the volumes under the CPG
imported in step (1)
3. Remove the old pool out of the catalog
4. Identify all services that mandate the use of the fore-mentioned pool and replace the specified
name appropriately so that the service is conformant again
In the event a CPG was deleted, all volumes in the CPG end up being deleted, which is catastrophic
as it results in data loss and inability for the application to access their volumes. Fixing this is
beyond the scope of SPM, however, the storage administrator should:
1. Re-sync the corresponding pool in SPM
2. Re-sync all volumes in the pool. As deleting a CPG results in the deletion of all volumes in that
CPG, the re-sync operation should result in putting all the volumes offline.
68 Working with 3PAR storage systems