HP Storage Provisioning Manager (SPM) version 2.3 User Guide

D Working with HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage Systems
Overview
HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage Systems have several value-add features. It is important to understand
how SPM handles management of environments using those features. See the following sections
for an explanation of these features.
Understanding how to import HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage Systems into
SPM
Using the Import Array feature in the SPM GUI, HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage Systems may be
imported into SPM. This in turn allows storage pools and volumes on the array to be imported.
During the array import wizard, a set of authentication credentials must be provided. SPM accesses
the HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage System with these credentials. The user name/password combination
given determines what child resources (storage pools and volumes) will be visible for importing,
based on the access that the given user is authenticated for. It is recommended that the user
credentials selected have an Edit or Super permission level on the array.
After importing the HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage System, storage pools may be imported. This step
of the import wizard shows a list of available storage pools. As mentioned above, this list is
constrained by what the authenticated user is permitted to access. Additionally, SPM constrains
this further to only show concrete pools and their derived pools. This means that the primordial
pool and replica pools will not be available to import. Note that SPM cannot create storage pools
on the HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage System.
After importing storage pools from the HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage System, volumes may be
imported. The list of available volumes is limited based on user access permissions, as well as
some additional constraints imposed by SPM. There are several classes of volumes that cannot be
imported: admin volumes, snapshot volumes, and remote copy volumes are all ignored by SPM's
import wizard.
Understanding HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage System capacity reporting
SPM tracks capacity for storage pools and volumes within its catalog. These capacity values are
used to generate candidates for storage provisioning. In order to understand the candidate
generation process, it is important to know what SPM tracks and how that relates to HP 3PAR
modeling of storage pools and volumes.
Storage pool capacity
At the storage pool level, SPM tracks physical capacity, committed capacity, and subscribed
capacity. Physical capacity is the total number of bytes that are physically allocated to the storage
pool. Committed capacity represents the space that has been allocated within the pool for all of
its volumes. Subscribed capacity is the total capacity for all the volumes contained in the pool.
Additionally there is a calculated value, available capacity, that is used when selecting candidate
pools for volume creation or growing.
Mapping these concepts onto the HP 3PAR resource model is complicated by HP 3PAR support of
two types of storage pools: concrete pools and Common Provisioning Groups (CPG).
In HP 3PAR concrete pools represent actual disk capacity in the system. There may be at most 3
concrete pools, each of which groups together hard disks of the same type; these concrete pools
are:
• all-FC for all fibre channel drives
• all-NL for all Nearline drives (SATA)
• all-SSD for all solid state drives
The sum of all concrete pools' capacity represents the raw capacity of the entire HP 3PAR StoreServ
Storage System. HP 3PAR volumes (a.k.a. virtual volumes) can be allocated directly from concrete
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