HP Logical Server Management Best Practices

Figure 11: Logical server storage provisioning with SPM

Figure 11 shows the automated population of storage details as well as the reduction in elapsed time between

request and response. As noted, the storage catalog can be pre-populated with volumes (resulting in the fastest

elapsed time) or the storage administrator could choose to provision individual requests. In this case there is the

benefit of the automated matching and visibility through the catalog, but there is more of a time delay as the storage

administrator must create, present, and zone the storage to fulfill the request. More details are available in the Faster

storage provisioning in the HP Matrix Operating Environment - Use of the HP Storage Provisioning Manager storage

catalog with controlled storage operations white paper available at http://www.hp.com/go/matrixoe/docs.

Other considerations and features

The previous sub-sections have discussed the flow of tasks and interactions for a single logical server. For example,

figure 9 shows the flow for creating one logical server, from the pre-work through the OS installation. The same

approach is used for multiple logical servers; a set of HBA WWNs are allocated, a set of storage is created and

presented, the various logical server storage definitions are updated, and those logical servers consuming that

storage can be activated as desired.

To accommodate a wide range of customer environments, the definition of storage pool entries representing logical

server needs can be performed through the Matrix OE GUI, or via new command line options. The Storage pool entry

export and import section provides more details on use of the CLI.

When the storage solution being used is the HP P6000/EVA, there are enhanced capabilities, including a storage

validation feature and the ability to discover volumes for easy import into the SPM storage catalog. When the server

administrator has received storage information from the storage administrator (pre-work step 3 in Figure 9), they have

the opportunity to have Matrix OE gather information about defined storage so it can be validated against the

requests. This validation feature is also supported for the HP Modular Smart Array solutions (MSA1000/1500 and

MSA2000fc G2). If using SPM, the storage administrator can discover volumes on the HP 3PAR StoreServe Storage

Systems, HP P6000/EVA or HP P9000/XP and automatically import selected volumes. SPM also supports on-demand