HP Logical Server Management Best Practices

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option of specifying a portability group including both servers using Virtual Connect and VMware ESX or HyperV
virtual machine hosts (to support cross-technology logical servers). When creating logical servers that will be virtual
machines, it is necessary to specify their storage requirements.
Matrix OE supports virtual machines backed by files in the hypervisor‟s file system, so storage definition involves
specifying the number of files and their sizes. That information is used to create the appropriate virtual disks for the
virtual machine. In addition, Matrix OE supports virtual machines using RDM (Raw Device Mapping) as a key
enabler for cross-technology logical servers which can move from physical servers to virtual machines, and back to
physical servers. This can be particularly useful for handling maintenance or disaster recovery needs.
Matrix OE supports hypervisors with a variety of storage configurations, including support for the file system of the
hypervisor on a local disk, Fibre Channel SAN, iSCSI, or (for VMware environments) on NAS/NFS. The virtual
machines will be backed by files in that hypervisor file system, and a storage entry is used to describe those files
needed by the virtual machine. Each virtual machine can have one storage entry, which can contain multiple volumes
(files) and that entry is not inserted into the storage pool.
Figure 32 shows the storage specification step when creating a logical server. Since this logical server is in an ESX
portability group, the storage type choices are for “File (VM) Storage Entry” or (with the Matrix OE support of RDM in
a VMware environment) “SAN Storage Entry”. The administrator can create the storage definition directly from this
screen using the “Create Storage Entry” button to the lower right of the Storage Assignments table. For this first
example, the “File (VM) Storage Entry” type is used (and thus is created from this page rather than found in the
storage pool). The storage entry will contain information about the number of files (virtual disks) required and their
sizes (as shown in Figure 33). For ESX virtual machines, the administrator is able to specify the ESX Data Store
Selection (shown in Figure 34 as local disk, SAN, or iSCSI).
Figure 32: Creating a logical server with virtual machine file-based storage
Figure 33 shows creating a file-based storage entry for a virtual machine logical server. The “Add Storage” button
has been used to specify one 10 GB and one 50 GB file (virtual disk or volume).