HP Lefthand SAN Solutions Support Document - User Manual - VSA User Manual for VMware ESX for SANiQ 8.0

Chapter: Designing A Virtual SAN 17
VSA Managers on 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.
Performance Impact of Mixing Platforms in Clusters
Mixing VSAs and physical platforms in the same SAN/iQ cluster is possible
but yields unpredictable performance results. Mixing VSAs built from
different hardware in the same cluster will also yield unpredictable
performance. Typically the overall performance of the cluster is close to the
aggregate average of all the storage nodes in the cluster.
Additionally, you may perceive performance degradation if a faster VSA fails,
thereby causing volumes to fail over to a slower VSA. This type of performance
degradation is normal in a mixed cluster.
Sample Configurations
Some sample configurations and their uses and benefits are described below.
Single Node Configuration
A single node configuration is useful for implementing a simple iSCSI target
that can scale up to a redundant iSCSI SAN of any size in the future. A single
node configuration consists of one VSA in a single management group, with a
single cluster, and running a single manager, shown in Figure 4.