Host sets and VV sets - best practices or suggestions

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kherrmann
Posts: 16
Joined: Wed Jul 25, 2012 3:00 pm

Host sets and VV sets - best practices or suggestions

Post by kherrmann »

Over the first few years of our 3PAR usage we've lacked a disciplined approach to rolling out VVs to our vmware clusters. We now have a tangled mess on our hands, and we are working dilligently to implement some structure around how we manage the storage to our VMWare hosts.

What we have now are servers that have a mix of VVsets and VVs exported to them. We also have some clusters in host sets, and others as standalones.

In untangling this mess, we came to a solution that seemed to make a lot of sense. We'd create Host Sets and VV Sets for each cluster. But in researching how to get to our ideal configuration (because dealing with these knots is very careful work), I discovered a thread on this site that seemed to speak against our proposed solution: viewtopic.php?f=18&t=141

This doesn't make much sense to me. Wouldn't the perfect setup for something like a VMWare cluster be the combined usage of Host Sets and VV Sets? Since all the hosts in a vmware cluster need to have access to the same storage. My take is that if I needed to move the host around, perhaps to a different cluster, it would be a piece of cake to unmount and detach the datastores and then remove the host from its current hostset to bring it back to a pristine state. It also provides convenience when we need to add a new VV...we just add it to the VV Set and all the hosts in the host set have access to it. Or if we need to add 5 more hosts to our cluster, we just add them to the host set, and then all of the VVs get automatically exported.

Is this not a practical direction? Any thoughts about what challenges this might bring about in the future?

Thanks for any help.
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