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

Technical white paper | Matrix OE and SPM

Introduction

With the release of the 7.2 Update 2 hotfix patch CMSOEPK-72X.3A14 (available in November 2013), HP Matrix Operating

Environment (Matrix OE) and HP Storage Provisioning Manager (SPM version 2.2.2) support fine-grained control over

controller port usage on SAN storage solutions. Using a new concept called port groups, administrators have tight control

over which servers access which volumes through what set of controller ports. In addition, administrators have the

capability of migrating volume access to new controller ports if it is determined that the load needs to be [re]balanced. This

paper describes the process of creating and using port groups. In addition, this paper will discuss three related new features:

· Least Used Port selection (automatic selection of port group)

· Port group selection script (manual selection of port group via a CLI script)

· Controller port ‘white list’ (administrator-defined list of HP 3PAR StoreServ controller ports available to SPM)

Background

Since the 7.0 release, Matrix OE (including Matrix infrastructure orchestration) supports fully automating the process of

creating volumes, presenting volumes to servers, and zoning access to storage. Matrix does this by allowing the

administrator to define storage requirements within Matrix IO service templates. These requirements are then passed down

to SPM to be fulfilled. SPM in turn uses the appropriate management interface for HP 3PAR StoreServ, P6000/EVA, or B-

Series SAN switches to automatically create new volumes, present them to servers as LUNs, and to create the needed SAN

zoning. Prior to this 7.2 Update 2 enhancement, SPM presented all created LUNs through all storage controller ports and

zoned the server (initiator) WWNs to all storage controller ports on the appropriate fabric, allowing all servers to see all

controller ports.

This behavior of automatically presenting and zoning to all of the controller ports raises the following concerns:

· 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.

These concerns can be addressed with the new port groups and white list capabilities of SPM.

Overview

This section provides an overview of the various features discussed in this document. Later sections discuss goals such as

automated and manual load balancing, and using subsets of storage controller ports for automated operations.

Port Groups

When using SPM with BNA (B-Series or Brocade Network Advisor) to automate zoning**, port groups allow the storage

administrator to preconfigure groups of controller ports that will always be zoned together when zoning to server WWNs.

Using port groups is optional. The current behavior described above will be used if port groups are not used. Port groups

only need to be defined once, and will be used from that point forward. A port group is limited to the set of controller ports

from a single storage array on a single fabric/network. A port group can contain anywhere from one controller port, to all of

the controller ports for an array on a given network. Port groups with only one controller port will provide one server WWN

to one controller port (one-to-one) zoning. Port groups that contain all of the controller ports on a given fabric provide the