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Lefthand SAN – Lessons learned

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Disclaimer: This article contains references to the words master and slave. I recognize these as exclusionary words. The words are used in this article for consistency because it’s currently the words that appear in the software, in the UI, and in the log files. When the software is updated to remove the words, this article will be updated to be in alignment. 

Please note that this article has been written in 2009. I do not know if Lefthand changed their solution. Please check with your HP representative for updates!

I recently had the opportunity to deliver a virtual infrastructure that uses HP Lefthand SAN solution.  Setting up a Lefthand SAN is not that difficult, but there are some factors to take into consideration when planning and designing a Lefthand SAN properly. These are my lessons learned.
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Deploying Volumes with Lefthand CLIQ

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Due to my extreme busy schedule I haven’t blogged for a while. Besides studying for VCDX and preparing for VMworld I’m also involved in a couple of projects. One project is designing and implementing a vSphere 4 virtual infrastructure. The VI will host an Exchange 2010 environment. Due to the size of my client’s environment, 192 TB is used for hosting mailboxes. These datastores will be available thru RDM, which means creating 192 1-TB volumes and assigning them to every ESX host in the cluster.
I’ve tried to use the Centralized Management Console, but it’s tedious and error prone work. Mind numbing repetitive exercises makes me ask really dumb questions on twitter such as where did SCSI id 7 go? <homer>D’oh!</homer>. So to protect myself from further bashing and being ridiculed I started to search for the Lefthand CLI to be able to automate the creation and assignment of volumes on a Lefthand SAN.
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Deploying Volumes with Lefthand (CLIQ)

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Due to my extreme busy schedule I haven’t blogged for a while. Besides studying for VCDX and preparing for VMworld I’m also involved in a couple of projects. One project is designing and implementing a vSphere 4 virtual infrastructure. The VI will host an Exchange 2010 environment. Due to the size of my client’s environment, 192 TB is used for hosting mailboxes. These datastores will be available thru RDM, which means creating 192 1-TB volumes and assigning them to every ESX host in the cluster.
I’ve tried to use the Centralized Management Console, but it’s tedious and error prone work. Mind numbing repetitive exercises makes me ask really dumb questions on twitter such as where did SCSI id 7 go? <homer>D’oh!</homer>. So to protect myself from further bashing and being ridiculed I started to search for the Lefthand CLI to be able to automate the creation and assignment of volumes on a Lefthand SAN.
[Read more…] about Deploying Volumes with Lefthand (CLIQ)

My first lefthand ISCSI VI architecture

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I’m currently reviewing a design of a new virtual infrastructure. The VI uses multiple 10GB links to connect to a very large HP Lefthand san. I’m more a Fibre Channel guy, but I believe that this solution will smoke most mid-range FC-sans. I cannot wait to deploy the VI on the SAN. But I need to get used to some differences between ISCSI and fibre channel configurations.
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