ESG Lab Review: HP P4000: Affordable, Scalable, Reliable Storage Upgrading from Virtual to Physical SAN


An HP P4000 SAN supports online upgrades from virtual to physical appliances. Physical P4000 SAN nodes run the same SAN/iQ software as VSA-enabled virtual SAN nodes. P4000 SANs combine industry standard server and storage technology with SAN/iQ software into a pre-packaged storage solution. A cluster of P4000 SAN nodes is used to create a unified pool of storage that is accessed by servers via a virtual IP address over Ethernet using the industry standard iSCSI protocol. The test bed shown in Figure 3 was used to upgrade the four-node VSA cluster running within virtual machines to a physical SAN running on four P4000 SAN nodes.


Figure 3. Virtual to Physical HP P4000 SAN Upgrade


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Online upgrade Four node VSA cluster Four node P4000 Series cluster


The upgrade process was performed online from the Centralized Management Console GUI. The same procedure that was used to add VSA nodes to the cluster was used to add the P4000 SAN nodes to the cluster. A similar operation was used to remove each of the VSA nodes from the cluster. From an administrator’s standpoint, the upgrade was completed in less than five minutes. The amount of time required for the automated migration of data from the old cluster to the new cluster depends on the amount of data to be migrated, the amount of server level activity that is occurring during the migration, and the priority that the administrator has defined for background restriping. The background restriping priority level can be changed on the fly.


Why This Matters


In a VSA deployment, SAN/iQ software and virtualized applications share the same processors, memory, IO, and storage. As a result, resource contention can arise as virtual applications and virtual storage contend for shared resources. As the environment grows, resource contention may require the addition of a dedicated HP P4000 SAN.


ESG Lab has confirmed that a VSA cluster can be upgraded online to take advantage of dedicated processing power, memory, and storage within a P4000 SAN. Because virtual and physical storage appliances share the same SAN/iQ software, the management interface is the same and adding resources to a virtual or physical P4000 SAN cluster is an intuitive online operation. Servers access a cluster of physical P4000 SAN appliances using the iSCSI protocol running over cost effective industry standard Ethernet infrastructure.


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