9.5 HP P4000 VSA Installation and Configuration Guide

Table 9 Memory requirements for VSA disks (continued)
Requires at least this much memoryTotal capacity of all installed disks
◦ 2 GB
◦ 4.5 TB to 9 TB
◦ 3 GB
◦ 9 TB to 10 TB
Hyper-V Server
◦ 1 GB◦ 500 GB up to, but less than 4.5 TB
◦ ◦4.5 TB up to, but less than 9 TB 2 GB
◦◦ 3 GB9 TB up to, but less than 10 TB
• A single virtual CPU with at least 2000 MHz reserved.
NOTE: The Hyper-V installer assigns 1000 MHz by default.
• A connection to a virtual switch or virtual network with at least a Gigabit network connection.
• Virtual disk(s) with 5 GB to 2 TB (2047 GB for ESX, 2040 GB for Hyper-V Server virtual
machines) of space per disk located on internal disk storage, or direct attached storage that
is not accessible from more than one physical server. (Note that the SAN/iQ software OS
consumes a small amount of the available space.)
◦ For ESX Server, the first virtual disk must be connected to SCSI address 1:0.
◦ For Hyper-V Server, the first virtual disk must be connected to the first SCSI Controller.
• All virtual disks for the ESX version VSA must be configured as independent and persistent to
prevent VM snapshots from affecting them.
• Virtual disks for Hyper-V Server version VSA must be fixed, not dynamic.
• The VMFS datastore or NTFS partition for the VSA must not be shared with any other VMs.
• Two or more VSAs on separate physical servers with Network RAID-10, and a Failover
Manager is the minimum configuration for high availability with automatic failover.
Two or more VSAs on separate physical servers can be clustered with a Virtual Manager for
manual failover.
Best practices
Other configuration recommendations are useful to improve the reliability and performance of your
virtual SAN. Consider implementing as many of these best practices as possible in your virtual
SAN environment.
Each VSA should meet the following conditions, if possible.
• Have a virtual switch or virtual network comprised of dual Gigabit Ethernet or more. Providing
network redundancy and greater bandwidth improves both performance and reliability.
• Be configured to start automatically and first, and before any other virtual machines, when
the ESX Server on which it resides is started. This ensures that the VSA is brought back online
as soon as possible to automatically re-join its cluster. The default installation configuration
for the VSA for Hyper-V Server is set to automatically start if it was running when the server
shut down.
• Use redundant RAID for the underlying storage of a VSA in each server to prevent single disk
failures from causing VSA system failure. Do not use RAID 0.
NOTE: See the HP P4000 SAN Solution User Guide for detailed information about using
RAID for individual server-level data protection.
20 Designing a virtual SAN