Operating Environment Software Instruction Manual

At service creation, infrastructure orchestration selects one or more storage pool entries from the
storage pool. Existing storage pool entries visible to infrastructure orchestration are already
associated with storage volumes (through manual fulfillment, or fulfillment though SPM). If there is
no suitable storage pool entry and SPM is being used, infrastructure orchestration will create a
storage pool entry and attempt to fulfill through SPM. If SPM fulfillment fails, infrastructure
orchestration indicates the need for manual storage provisioning. Given a storage pool entry,
infrastructure orchestration examines the initiator WWNs associated with each of the storage pool
entries and performs the required assignment to the server in order to enable server visibility within
the SAN to the set of SAN volume targets defined by the storage pool entries.
This process has the advantage of the ability to separate the boot and data storage visibility to the
server during OS provisioning without requiring any access to the existing SAN management
interfaces. The approach is limited to Virtual Connect managed servers only.
NOTE: For non-Integrity servers, NPIV is enabled by default.
Manually enable NPIV for Integrity servers that use both private and shared disks for storage auto
provisioning. Set npiv.integrity.enabled=true in ..\Program Files\HP\Matrix
infrastructure orchestration\conf\hpio.properties to enable NPIV support on
Integrity servers. (The npiv.integrity.enabled property is set to false by default.)
Dynamic SAN volume automation
In a more dynamic environment, pre-provisioned SAN volumes can have their LUN masking adjusted
appropriately, or SAN volumes can be provisioned on-demand with suitable LUN masking.
In the pre-provisioned use case, SAN volumes are pre-created within SPM but are not yet masked
to one or more initiator WWNs. Zoning must be pre-configured. The SAN volumes are made
available within the SPM storage catalog and are visible in Matrix OE visualization’s storage pool
as storage pool entries (either in advance for manually created storage pool entries, or at service
provisioning when infrastructure orchestration automatically generated the storage pool entries).
At service creation, infrastructure orchestration attempts to find a suitable storage pool entry. The
storage pool entry must fully match the storage requirements for the logical server: number of SAN
volumes, size, RAID level, OS type, redundancy, and optionally a set of one or more tags. Unlike
the multi-initiator NPIV approach above, infrastructure orchestration is able to perform automatic
LUN masking and host mode assignment through SPM. This allows infrastructure orchestration to
separate the visibility of boot and data storage during OS provisioning. It also allows a single
storage pool entry to be re-used across different logical servers because the host mode may also
be set dynamically based on the logical server’s requirements.
If a suitable storage pool entry is not found, infrastructure orchestration creates a storage pool
entry and attempts to fulfill the request through SPM (matching to a pre-provisioned volume or using
on-demand provisioning, based on the SPM storage template policies). The storage returned meets
the needs of the service being provisioned, including masking/presentation to suitable initiator
WWNs.
This process is supported only on Virtual Connect managed servers. This approach requires that
a SAN administrator be willing to grant restricted access to the disk array management interface
for performing the SAN volume inventory and LUN masking operations, and, if using on-demand
provisioning, volume creation operations and access to the Brocade SAN management SMI-S
instrumentation for SAN zoning. Storage administrators can specify policies within storage templates
using SPM. SPM enables the storage administrator to create storage templates, which can capture
policies such as size (with boundaries), RAID level to use (or avoid), tags, use of pre-provisioned
SAN volumes and/or on-demand provisioining, use of thin provisioning (or preventing its use),
and other aspects. SPM catalog entries represent the pre-provisioned SAN volumes and have
granular control over operations (some may support LUN masking and changing host mode, others
may not). This provides much more granular control than giving the server administrator the Admin
password to the storage array.
Dynamic SAN volume automation 137