HP LeftHand SAN Solutions Support Document - User Manual - User Manual VSA 7.0 SP1 for VMware

Chapter: Designing A Virtual SAN 11
• Be located on the same virtual switch as the VMkernel network used for
iSCSI traffic. This allows for a portion of iSCSI IO to be served directly
from the VSA to the iSCSI initiator without using a physical network.
• Be on a virtual switch that is separate from the VMkernel network used
for VMotion™. This prevents VMotion traffic and VSA IO traffic from
interfering with each other and affecting performance.
• Be configured to start automatically and first, and before any other virtual
machines, when the ESX Server on which it resides is started. This
ensures that the VSA is brought back online as soon as possible to
automatically re-join its SAN/iQ cluster.
• Use redundant RAID for the underlying storage of a VSA in each ESX
Server to prevent single disk failures from causing VSA node failure. Do
not use RAID 0.
— See the section “Planning the RAID Configuration” of the Storage
chapter in the LeftHand SAN User Manual for detailed information
about using RAID for individual server-level data protection.
The LeftHand SAN User Manual is available in PDF format and is
installed in the Documentation subdirectory with the Centralized
Management Console program files. You can also find the information
in the online Help, available from the Help menu and the
context-sensitive Help buttons on each window in the Centralized
Management Console.
Unsupported Configurations
Some configurations that are possible using VMware ESX and the VSA are
specifically not supported for production use at this time.
LeftHand Networks does not support:
• More than 1 NIC configured on the VSA.
• Use of any shared storage as the data location of the VSA.
This includes shared DAS, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NAS.
• Use of VMware snapshots, VMotion, HA, or DRS on the VSA itself.
• Use of any configuration that VMware does not support.
• Booting ESX off of a VSA cluster.
• Extending the data (SCSI 1:0) vmdk of the VSA.