HP Storage Provisioning Manager (SPM) version 2.1 User Guide

D Working with 3PAR storage systems
Overview
3PAR Storage Systems have several value-add features. It is important to understand how SPM
handles management of environments using those features. See the following sections for an
explanation of these features.
Understanding how to import 3PAR arrays into SPM
Using the Import Array feature in the SPM GUI, 3PAR arrays may be imported into SPM. This in
turn allows storage pools and volumes on the array to be imported. During the array import wizard,
a set of authentication credentials must be provided. SPM accesses the 3PAR array with these
credentials. The user name/password combination given determines what child resources (storage
pools and volumes) will be visible for importing, based on the access that the given user is
authenticated for. It is recommended that the user credentials selected have an Edit or Super
permission level on the array.
After importing the 3PAR array, storage pools may be imported. This step of the import wizard
shows a list of available storage pools. As mentioned above, this list is constrained by what the
authenticated user is permitted to access. Additionally, SPM constrains this further to only show
concrete pools and their derived pools. This means that the primordial pool and replica pools will
not be available to import. Note that SPM has no mechanism for creating storage pools on the
3PAR array.
Storage pools associated with a virtual domain should not be imported into SPM because of
limitations with supporting volumes in a virtual domain. If a storage pool associated with a virtual
domain is imported, its volumes will not be available for import and SPM will have errors creating
new volume presentations associated with the pool.
After importing storage pools from the 3PAR array, volumes may be imported. The list of available
volumes is limited based on user access permissions, as well as some additional constraints imposed
by SPM. There are several classes of volumes that cannot be imported: admin volumes, snapshot
volumes, remote copy volumes, and volumes in a virtual domain will all be ignored by SPM's
import wizard.
Understanding 3PAR capacity reporting
SPM tracks capacity for storage pools and volumes within its catalog. These capacity values are
used to generate candidates for storage provisioning. In order to understand the candidate
generation process, it is important to know what SPM tracks and how that relates to 3PAR modeling
of storage pools and volumes.
Storage pool capacity
At the storage pool level, SPM tracks physical capacity, committed capacity, and subscribed
capacity. Physical capacity is the total number of bytes that are physically allocated to the storage
pool. Committed capacity represents the space that has been allocated within the pool for all of
its volumes. Subscribed capacity is the total capacity for all the volumes contained in the pool.
Additionally there is a calculated value, available capacity, that is used when selecting candidate
pools for volume creation or growing.
Mapping these concepts onto the 3PAR resource model is complicated by 3PAR support of two
types of storage pools: concrete pools and Common Provisioning Groups (CPG).
In 3PAR concrete pools represent actual disk capacity in the system. There may be at most 3
concrete pools, each of which groups together hard disks of the same type; these concrete pools
are:
• all-FC for all fibre channel drives
• all-NL for all Nearline drives (SATA)
• all-SSD for all solid state drives
68 Working with 3PAR storage systems