HP Logical Server Management Best Practices

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Figure 10: Logical server storage provisioning (without SPM)
Planning discussions vary by customer, but typically involve anticipated storage needs for servers required over the
next several months or quarters. Many environments define specific tiers of usage, and may allocate storage in
standard sizes or have policies for boot volume allocation (perhaps differing by OS). Tags can be used to capture
these categorizations and tags specified in the infrastructure orchestration service template will be matched against
the defined storage pool entries.
Figure 10 shows the use of the HP SPM storage catalog. The details of the storage requests (including tags) are
automatically matched against the volumes in the storage catalog. When a suitable candidate is chosen, the storage
details are automatically populated into the logical server storage pool entries. This eliminates the need for the
storage administrator to manually respond to each individual request, resulting in faster logical server storage
provisioning. In addition, SPM provides a convenient way to view all requests (unfulfilled and fulfilled) and can
enable controlled use of storage operations such as changing the host mode of a volume or adjusting the LUN
masking.
The ability to perform these controlled storage operations allows Matrix OE more flexibility in using storage pool
entries. For example, when defining a logical server, a storage pool entry can be chosen which matches all other
attributes, but just needs the host mode adjusted to match the logical server OS. LUN masking can be used to ensure
data volumes are not visible during OS installation. Customers using the infrastructure orchestration features of Matrix
OE will benefit from it automatically using this LUN masking feature through SPM to hide data volumes before
invoking OS installation jobs. This eliminates the manual step of needing to add data volumes after successful OS
installation.