Even though I've known about 3PAR for years, I'm new to managing 3PAR systems. We have an F400 unit here at UT Dallas and am trying to learn more about these systems, particularly in using them with VMware vSphere.
Anyways, I'm glad to find a 3PAR user group with folks from the Dallas / Ft. Worth area Does anyone here make it to any of the DFW VMUG meetings?
I haven't been to a VMUG yet, but I 'm considering going to the next one on Aug 24th I believe. We're doing alot of P2V here, and Datastore layout is a topic of much discussion here. Our ESX farm is up to 16.8 TB of VMFS and still growing.
The biggest deal with 3PAR and vsphere we have had to date is making sure that every LUN is set to round robin failover mode. It defaults to using the last known good path. The problem with that default is there little control over which path the ESX servers will pick on... so instead of distributing the load to as many 3PAR front end ports as possible, each ESX lun will "pick" a working path and stick with it, leaving open to chance the oversaturation of individual paths.
The 3PAR ESX 3.x 4.x Implemtation Guide pages 43 has information on how to change the defaults to be round robin. Huge time saver.
Richard Siemers The views and opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.
Thanks for the tip - I'll be sure to look closely at the ESX Implementation Guide on that!
There have been a number of "gotchas" that have been hot topics at VMUG - the most common was disk alignment for older MS systems. If the virtual disk wasn't aligned properly to the spindle it would generate higher IO because a sector read would require two read operations on physical disk rather than just one. Mainly a problem for Windows Server 2003 and older since 2008 aligns correctly.
Just as a heads up the Aug 24 VMUG has been canceled because of the timing with VMworld. I'm not sure when the next meeting is exactly - I have November 9th written down at the PISD Sockwell Center but I would need to verify that.
The old 3par document repository was customer only... it's currently being migrated to HP's existing support infastructure so perhaps it will open up and be indexed by google.
Does anyone here make it to any of the DFW VMUG meetings?
