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

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same behavior as not using port groups. Since port groups define zoning, each port group must contain controller ports

from the same fabric. See the Defining Port Groups section for details of how to define port groups.

** Port groups are not needed and should not be used if doing manual zoning. When doing manual zoning, the

administrator already has complete control over controller port access.

Least Used Port policy

When port groups are defined, SPM will automatically use port groups for zoning based on a ‘least used port’ policy. SPM

will identify which controller port is used by the least number of services*, and select the port group that contains that port.

This allows users to automatically take advantage of the port group based zoning without doing any additional work. Matrix

does not directly provide a way to define which port groups to use when defining storage for fulfillment through SPM.

Because of this, all storage created after port groups are defined will initially be zoned using the least used port policy. If

you desire, this can be manually changed later using a port group selection script (e.g., to fine-tune the load balancing

across controller ports).

* When using the least used port policy, actual disk I/O is not taken into consideration when determining which port to use.

Because of this, ports automatically selected by SPM may actually be the most heavily used. This can be manually

rebalanced using the port group selection script described below.

Port Group selection script

When using port groups, you allow SPM to automatically select which port groups to use based on a least used port policy. If

the storage administrator needs to load balance, or to direct the disk I/O for specific servers to specific storage controller

ports, they will need to manually select the port groups. A PowerShell script is supplied to help the administrator do this.

The script takes the server WWN to be rezoned and the name of the new port group to be used for zoning. It then performs

the following actions

1. Delete the zone containing the server WWN and the original controller port(s)

2. Create a new zone containing the server WWN and the new controller port(s)

Note that using this script may temporarily take one or more LUNs offline, possibly causing server issues (e.g., if the boot or

data disks become unavailable). This can be avoided with proper configuration and processes. See the section Manually

Selecting Port Groups, which describes using this port group selection script (including the means of identifying which ports

are overloaded and which servers are currently using those ports).

Controller Port White List (3PAR StoreServ Only)

The 3PAR configuration file <SPM install location>/state/3par_storage/Configuration.xml can

now include a section describing array ports that may be used by SPM. This allows administrators to specify a subset of

storage controller target ports available on a 3PAR StoreServ storage system for use by SPM/Matrix. This optional section is

called "ArrayPortWhiteLists". If a white list is not present in the configuration file for a particular HP 3PAR StoreServ storage

system, SPM behaves as it did in SPM 2.2.0, using all storage system controller ports. If a white list is present in the

configuration file for a particular HP 3PAR StoreServ storage system, SPM will only make use of the target ports listed in the

white list. Please see the HP Storage Provisioning Manager (SPM) User Guide for more information.

Example HP 3PAR StoreServ Configuration File

An example configuration file containing a white list is illustrated below. Note that array names within the white list are the

array names of arrays as visible in the SPM user interface (case sensitive), not the fully qualified domain name of the storage

system.

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<Configuration xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" Version="2.2"

xmlns="urn:TPDStoragePlugin">

...

...

</OSPersonaMap>

</OSPersonaMaps>