9.5 HP P4000 VSA Installation and Configuration Guide

a VSA using less than 4.5 TB, a platform with 10 GB of RAM could host a VSA and use 8 GB of
memory to share for other VMs.
Virtual switch or network
The virtual switch or network should be entirely dedicated to the VSA and not used for any other
traffic.
Controllers and hard drives
The internal disk controller and actual hard disk drives of a platform affect the capacity and IO
performance of the VSA. Ideally VSAs should use storage that is hosted by many SAS or SCSI
drives. If you are designing a new server that will host VSAs, you should incorporate the following
recommendations.
• Use as many hard drives as the platform will allow and prefer faster rotation speeds. The more
hard drives and the faster their rotation speed, the more IOPs, and better performance.
• Select controllers with protected write cache and ensure that the write cache is enabled.
Network adapters
The number of network adapters available in a platform affects your options for configuring virtual
switches. VSAs that will have a dedicated server platform only need 2 Gigabit network adapters.
Platforms that will host VSAs and other virtual machines should have at least 4 Gigabit network
adapters so that two adapters can be dedicated to the VSA and iSCSI traffic.
Virtual network design
The virtual switch or virtual network that is used for VSA should be at least a redundant Gigabit
network, if possible. Performance and reliability can be improved even further by using more than
two Gigabit adapters in the iSCSI and VSA virtual networks.
Using VSAs with HP SAN Solutions
VSAs and physical platforms can be mixed in management groups and clusters. When mixing
virtual and physical platforms, and mixing differently configured VSAs, you should take the following
requirements and guidelines into consideration.
• Cloning VSAs
To clone a VSA, you must do so while the VSA is still in the Available Systems pool, before
you add it to a management group. Cloning a VSA after it is in a management group is not
supported.
NOTE: Configure the first VSA for RAID and Networking. Then create your clone with the
hardware settings already configured.
• Running managers on physical platforms
When possible, locate all managers in a management group on physical platforms instead
of VSAs, and ideally on the fastest platforms in the management group. While VSAs can run
managers, physical platforms provide better performance and a lower likelihood that they
will be rebooted for administrative reasons.
22 Designing a virtual SAN