HP LeftHand VSA: Love at First Sight

Been meaning to do this since I first saw it when messing around with ESXi, but never got around to it. As of now it’s actually called the HP StorageWorks P4000 virtual SAN, way too long. After a quick registration, you can download it from here. The website states that it is a 60 day trial, but that only turns on once you enable one of the 4 advanced features, such as clustering or remote copy, else it’s free forever.

Network Setup:

By default, the VSA is set to NAT as its network configuration, change that to bridge. One you boot up the VSA, either on ESX(i) or Workstation, you are prompted to type Start and Enter to proceed to the configuration menu.

Now we have to configure the management network address. Go down and select Network TCP/IP Settings and then eth0.

On this section you’ll need to use tabs instead of the directional pad, how annoying, the fields don’t even clear out either.

Couple of backs and logging out and we’re done with this part. Now you’ll have to install the management tool Central Management Console(CMC). It’s in the package you downloaded CMC_8.5.00.0313_Installer.exe. Once that’s done, go ahead and open it up, you’ll be presented with this wizard.

This is by far the best part, you can search for available nodes via subnet.

Just click add and insert the necessary info.

Now it’s automagically found it, awesome eh?

Disk Setup:

Now that we got the network portion done. The VSA has a limit of 5 disks sadly, 1 of the 5 comes prepackaged with the Laptop(Workstation) version. If you downloaded the version for ESX, you will need to create a new disk and assign it SCSI 1:0 for it to work correctly, either way the rest of the disks have to be 1:1-1:4.

If you added more storage, you’ll have to go into into Storage and click on the Disk Setup tab, right click on a disk and add to RAID. Now all the drives will be usable.

Now that that’s done, we gotta create a management group to control all of the functionality of the SAN. It’s under the menu as you see next.

Now we just have to give it a name.

For this, we need to make an administrator account, this will also inturn lockout all unauthorized access to the SAN’s console.

Since we only have one node right now, go ahead and select Standard Cluster and give it a name.

Last and final part, sorta, is making your first volume. I laid this one out simply.

iSCSI Setup:

Setting up hosts to allow access is rather simple, you’ll see a new slue of available options and such. You’ll want to head over to the Assigned Servers tab under Volumes and Snapshots and click on Server Tasks, then New Server.

You either have 2 choices here, 1 is using CHAP or no CHAP(that sounds so wrong). I just used my desktop as it was easily available.

After clicking OK we’re whisked away to one of the new sections, Servers, where my Desktop is available. Here we can control which Volumes it can see. Again, the most important parts are either under Tasks or right clicking on the object.

Check and we’re done.

All’s well on the Windows side. As you can see, the iSCSI session was successfully established and now the volume is presented to my desktop.

Another great feature on this is when CREATING volumes, you can set what can and can’t see it.

That’s pretty much it. This is definitely the most responsive VSA I’ve used so far, there’s never a slow lag between windows or operations, just fantastic.

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