11.0 HP StoreVirtual Storage VSA Installation and Configuration Guide (TA688-96141, September 2013)

For additional information about unsupported configurations and best practices, see the HP
StoreVirtual Storage User Guide.
Hardware design for the StoreVirtual VSA
The hardware platform used for a virtual storage pool affects the capacity, performance, and
reliability of that virtual storage pool. The hardware features listed below affect the StoreVirtual
VSA configuration.
• CPU
• Memory
• Virtual switch or network
• Controllers and hard disk drives
• Network adapters
CPU
Because the CPUs of the StoreVirtual VSA must be reserved, platforms that will host a StoreVirtual
VSA and other virtual machines (VMs) should be built with more processor cores to accommodate
the additional VMs. Multi-core processors with at least 2 GHz per core should be used so that two
cores can be reserved for the StoreVirtual VSA. All additional cores are then available for use with
other VMs, thereby avoiding resource contention with the virtual storage pool. For example, a
platform with two dual-core processors could host a StoreVirtual VSA and use two cores to share
for other VMs.
Memory
Similarly, the memory of the StoreVirtual VSA must be reserved. For platforms that will host a
StoreVirtual VSA and other VMs, install additional memory to accommodate the additional VMs.
All system memory on the host that is not reserved for the StoreVirtual VSA can be used by other
VMs.
Virtual switch or network
The virtual switch or network should be dedicated to the StoreVirtual VSA and iSCSI initiators that
are accessing the StoreVirtual cluster.
The virtual switch or virtual network that is used for StoreVirtual VSA should be at least a redundant
Gigabit network, if possible. Performance and reliability can be improved even further by using
more than two ethernet adapters in the iSCSI and StoreVirtual VSA virtual networks or by using
10 GbE network adapters.
Controllers and drives
The internal disk controller and disk drives of a platform affect the capacity and I/O performance
of the StoreVirtual VSA. Ideally, StoreVirtual VSAs should use storage that is hosted by many drives.
If you are designing a new server that will host StoreVirtual VSAs, you should incorporate the
following recommendations.
• When using hard drives, use as many drives as the platform will allow and that have faster
rotation speeds. The more hard drives and the faster their rotation speed, the more IOPs, and
better performance.
• If using Adaptive Optimization, use SSD drives for ten percent of the storage capacity.
• Select controllers with protected write cache and ensure that the write cache is enabled.
• Do not enable disk caching on servers that host VSAs.
• Every virtual disk should be RAID-protected and not configured with RAID 0.
Hardware design for the StoreVirtual VSA 7