HPE Storage Users Group

3PAR best practice docs have specific OS recommendations with regards to MPIO, hotfixes, registry settings, etc before presenting LUNs to servers using those specific OSes (Windows 2008/2008R2, RedHat, etc) What is the best way to handle a situation where you already have a storage array from a different vendor presenting LUNs to the servers? That is, is this generally frowned upon with Windows/Linux? Does HP have recommendations for this? So far I haven't been able to find anything.

Thanks in advance

So without a whole lot of information regarding the unique situation you're presented with, we're left to make assumptions...

That being said, generally speaking, it should work just fine. If you were connecting say emc and 3par to the same host, you would install both the powerpath dsm, and the 3par dsm. What would happen in an ideal world is the pp dsm would claim the luns in recognizes (vnx/vmax/clariion/symmetrix/whatever) and the 3par dsm would claim the luns recognized as 3par and all would be right with the world.

I would suggest definitely testing it before trying it on a production system. In some cases it has been suggested to have a seperate hba for each vendor, but in most cases I think that's a little silly.

Can you be more specific regarding the other array, windows version, etc?

I've had 3PAR and MSA series connected to the same server before and you pretty much just followed the MSA best practice on the MSA LUNs and 3PAR best practice on 3PAR LUNs.

I don't expect there to be official word on coexisting with other vendors but these sort of things shouldn't clash.

We run several servers in our environment which are connected to SAN's of different types and have never seen a prob

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Thank you all for your replies.

I'm unable to test in a non production environment because we don't have one for this app.

The app in question is sort of a file server / an archive system running on Redhat. It's not IO heavy but it uses a lot of disk, currently 25TB+ and growing. There are currently 3 dual port HBAs 1st two are being used by 2 different direct attached SANs from smaller vendors one I think is from Rorke (or something like that) not sure of the second one. OS in use is Redhat. I'm trying to consolidate our multiple smaller/independent storage arrays because it's getting harder to support all of them so planning to use our 3PAR 7400 for additional storage for this server using the 3rd HBA and perhaps getting away from the other 2 SANs all together in the future.

For our VM environment we had NetApp and added 3par and storage vmotioned all our VMs tfrom NetApp to 3par live without interruption. Just did similar migration on AIX from XIV to 3par, so you can easily have different brands of storage presented to hosts as long as they have proper MPIO support, IBM XIV needed special drivers for Windows. When we did traditional VADP vmware backups we had our backup servers presented with HP EVA and 3par storage, again without issue.