HP Matrix Operating Environment and HP Storage Provisioning Manager support for port groups

Technical white paper | Matrix OE and SPM
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© Copyright 2013 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for
HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as
constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
5900-3368, December 2013
Summary
Using the new port group feature (available in SPM version 2.2.2 and later) gives administrators the ability to control zoning
like never before. When automating zoning through SPM, administrators can now control which controller ports are zoned
together with an initiator WWN (versus the default of zoning to all ports on a fabric/network). A white list can be defined for
HP 3PAR StoreServ indicating a subset of controller ports to be used (versus all discovered ports). These capabilities provide
a solution to the concerns with zoning all controller ports to an initiator, including:
· It can make controller ports look like they are oversubscribed.
This is especially concerning for HP 3PAR StoreServ storage, which sets limits on how many servers can access
each controller port. The best practice to avoid this issue is to zone one server WWN to one or two controller
ports, limiting visibility. Each server can then be zoned to different sets of controller ports, balancing the load.
(The limits, and the best practices to avoid these limits, are discussed in detail within the whitepaper Best
practices for HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage with the HP Matrix Operating Environment and SAN configurations.)
· It does not allow the administrator to control the distribution of I/O load across controller ports
Without controlling load balancing via zoning, it is highly likely that some controller ports may be overused, while
others remain unused or more lightly used.
· It does not allow Matrix/SPM to use a subset of the storage solution controller ports
Some environments may involve a storage solution intended to be used by Matrix/SPM in addition to other
purposes, with the desire to segregate I/O traffic across different ports.
For More Information
Please see the following website(s) and document(s) for more information
· HP 3PAR StoreServ Solutions
http://hp.com/go/storage
http://hp.com/go/3parstoreserv
· Enabling Storage Automation in HP CloudSystem Matrix
http://hp.com/go/matrix
http://hp.com/go/matrixondemandstorage
· Matrix Operating Environment documentation website
http://hp.com/go/matrixoe/docs
- Whitepaper: Faster storage provisioning in the HP Matrix Operating Environment: use of the HP Storage
Provisioning Manager storage catalog with controlled storage operations
- Whitepaper: Best practices for HP 3AR StoreServ Storage with the HP Matrix Operating Environment and SAN
configuration
- HP Storage Provisioning Manager (SPM) User Guide