HPE Storage Users Group

Hi all! Just wrapped up the installation of our first 3PAR array (two-node 7400) yesterday afternoon...after years of doing virtualization for my company they've finally granted my little systems engineering group our own lab which includes the aforementioned array and an HP C7000 hooked up via HP's "flat SAN" methodology I'm beginning to do some shakedown testing, etc.

I couldn't resist doing the n00b thing first...I exported a VV and ran some IOMeter (VMware's I/O Analyzer) tests on it from a blade in the C7000. The metrics I observed in the vSphere client performance tab were not what I expected (FWIW PSP is set per 3PAR recommendation to round robin and I've set the IOPS to 1)...the blade has two VirtualConnect HBAa and one of them is experiencing elevated latency, in the 20msec range, the other one is essentially zero.

Anyone have a thought on where I might start investigating this?

Firstly, you don't say what VMware version it is, also, what version of virtual connect are you using.

Also, are you using the hp version of ESXi download and have you updated the relevant firmware versions of the cna (Ethernet and FC) from the vibs depot recipe guide?

When running virtual connect it's important to have the right firmware and drivers for the specific ESXi version according to the recipe guide as those are tested configurations that should work.

So I would start making sure that's all correct before any sort of troubleshooting.

As it's not the Ethernet you're seeing issues with then we don't need to look at the server profile and uplinks etc.

I'm presuming you have it as two separate fabrics though and are using all 4 ports on the 3par and are seeing 4 active (IO) paths in VMware.

David.

Also no mention of the drive configurations on the array or CPG setup.

Fair enough guys...my bad on not enough info. It was a long week and I had brain fry.

ESXi 5.5 U1 Enterprise Plus, and yes I did of course use the HP custom ISO. Not sure on the VC version, I was told during install that they updated it to the latest version (I will look in the UI tomorrow) as well as performing the latest updates on all of the other pieces as well (C7000, blades, etc. etc. etc.). I must say I was pretty impressed with the hardware install guys. On the subject of the array setup, it's presently 72 FC drives (10k 900GB)...our NL shelf was damaged in shipping and is due to be replaced next week. I was testing to a 1TB RAID-5 volume.

After my initial post I slept for awhile and then read manuals...I found that the guys (3PAR) who'd configured the system had changed *out* of a lot of the default settings for the ports and hosts. I made a note of the settings and then moved to defaults. That in conjunction with a reset of the VC modules (hitting the reset button in the VC UI) seems to have cured my ills. Prior to that I could watch the FC stats for too long and too short FC frames increase like mad.

Again, sorry for the rather sparse amount of initial info. And thanks for the prod to deliver more. As this is my first storage array and blade chassis it's a bit overwhelming...seems like there are a lot of balls in the air.

Oh, and 3.1.2 MU5

Glad to hear you lab is up and running.

As far as doing n00b stuff, we've been playing with the VMWare I/O Analyzer on a 3par and a Compellent in our lab, which uses IOmeter behind the scenes. A work in progress.

You might make sure the Execution Throttle for the physical HBAs is set to the maximum. On the older QLogic cards the default was something like 16, on the newer cards it defaults to the maximum of 65535 which is the 3PAR recommendation. Not sure were to set that on the C7000 though.

Glad you got it sorted, it's also worth taking a look at the best practices guide with vsphere, hopefully you are already using round robin, but there's also a new recommendation to change the round robin oops from 1000 to 1 as per on page 7

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.asp ... 286ENW.pdf

The firmware and drivers listed in the vibs recipe though is also really important in my experience, when dealing with blades and virtual connect.