StoreOnce VSA

QuickSpecs
HPE StoreOnce VSA Software
Configuration Information
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StoreOnce VSA Configuration Guidelines
Please read and understand the following general and hypervisor specific configuration guidelines before deploying StoreOnce VSA.
Recommendations
• It is recommended that at least one virtual disk is allocated to the StoreOnce VSA before the first power on. Additional virt
ual
disks can be added later to increase capacity up to the licensed capacity.
• Plan to add virtual disks as needed
to the StoreOnce VSA. Once a virtual disk is added it cannot be removed, to reclaim the
space or increase the size, without destroying the StoreOnce VSA.
• Use RAID protection for the storage allocated to the StoreOnce VSA for resilience against hard disk failure.
•
The storage used for the StoreOnce VSA should not be shared with the storage used by the protected virtual machines,
particularly if backup data replication is not used.
• Reserve all memory and CPU allocated to the Storeonce VSA. Overprovisioning mem
ory or CPU can lead to insufficient
resources available to deliver the expected performance.
•
Periodically monitor allocated resource utilization and allocate additional resources if the current allocated resources are
approaching saturation.
• Performance ca
n be seen using hypervisor performance monitoring tools. These vary between VMware vSphere and
Windows Hyper-
V. Adding resources requires the StoreOnce VSA to be restarted so these upgrades should be done outside
backup times.
VMware configuration notes
•
Typical Installation will take 20 minutes depending on the installation method used and the environment. Other factors that
determine the installation time are the storage used, the host platform and the storage capacity configured.
• It is recommended
that the virtual disks used to provide capacity for StoreOnce VSA are in a .vmdk format from a VMFS3,
VMFS5 or VMFS6 data store. NFS data stores are supported but careful consideration of the performance implications should
be made before deployment. Raw disks are not supported.
•
If the VMware host has AMD CPUs some configuration is needed to run the StoreOnce VSA. It is necessary to create a single
host cluster with the EVC (Enhanced vMotion Compatibility) mode set to AMD generation 3 or earlier.
• Thick and
thin provisioned virtual disks are supported to provision storage for backup data. If thin provisioned virtual disks
are selected, care should be taken to ensure that the datastore is backed by sufficient physical storage.
• StoreOnce VSA is supported for u
se with vMotion and Storage vMotion during backup and recovery operations. It is also
supported in environments using vSphere High Availability and vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler. Support for
vSphere Fault Tolerance is limited to StoreOnce VSA conf
igurations with a maximum of 8 vCPUs due to this VMWare
maximum.
Hyper-V configuration notes
Note: Hyper-V support is not currently supported with VSA version 4.2 code
• Unzipping the virtual machine file can take up to 15 minutes. Installation time depends upon how heavily the Hyper-
V Server
is being used and how much capacity is configured.
• The StoreOnce VSA requires NTFS storage. There is no support for NFS data stores or pass-
through disks. StoreOnce VSA
can run on all processors supported for Windows Server Hyper-
V provided the performance and quantity meets the minimum
requirements for the capacity of the configured StoreOnce VSA.
• Fixed and dynamically expanding virtual hard disks (.VHDX or .VHD) are supported to provision storage for backup data
. If
dynamically expanding virtual hard disks are selected, care should be taken to ensure that the NTFS Logical Volume is
backed by sufficient physical storage.
• StoreOnce VSA supports use of Hyper-V Live Migration during backup and recovery operations.