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One of the tasks that I finish before I present the first Virtual Volumes (VV) to hosts is to discuss the need of a custom SATP claimrule with the customer. Requirement for a custom claimrule is usually, that the active and optimized path should be switched after each IO and not after 1000 IOs. Duncan Epping wrote a nice blog post some years ago. I recommend to read it.

Some basics

The Storage Array Type Plug-In (SATP) is responsable for array-specific operations, like health monitoring of physical paths, reporting of path state changes and path failover. Each SATP is linked to a Path Selection Policy (PSP), which controls the selection of active paths for IO. VMware ESXi provides a couple of SATPs:

HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimization (AO) enables autonomic storage tiering on HP 3PAR storage arrays. With this feature the HP 3PAR storage system analyzes IO and then migrates regions of 128 MB between different storage tiers. Frequently accessed regions of volumes are moved to higher tiers, less frequently accessed regions are shifted to lower tiers. I often talk with customers about AO and I know that this feature is sometimes misunderstood and misconfigured. This blog post is a summary of in my opinion important topics.

The last two days I had a lot of trouble with Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDP), or to use the older wording, terminal services. To be honest: Terminal servers are not really my specialty, and actually I was at the customer to help him with some vSphere related changes. But because I was there, I was asked to throw a closer look at some problems with their Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 based terminal server farm. Some problems with removable media (USB sticks etc.) and audio on IGEL thin clients were hard to troubleshoot, but we were able to fix them. The main problem was none at first glance.

Some weeks ago, Frank Denneman wrote a short blog post about accessing his Supermicro IPMI with SSH. He used this access to power on his lab servers.I don’t use Supermicro boards in my lab, but I have four HP ProLiants with iLO and iLO has a also a SSH interface. This way to power on my servers seemed very practical, especially because the iLO web interface isn’t the fastest. But I wanted it a bit more automated, so I decided to use Plink to send commands via SSH.

HP StoreOnce Appliances or VSA offers three different types of backup destinations:

• Virtual Tape Library (VTL)
• NAS (CIFS or NFS)
• StoreOnce Catalyst

If you use Veeam Backup & Replication, the NAS feature is possibly worth a try. Using the NAS feature, the StoreOnce appliance or VSA offers a CIFS or NFS share, which can be used as a backup destionation. Today I want to show you how you can use a NAS share of a StoreOnce VSA with Veeam Backup & Replication.To backup virtual maschines with Veeam Backup & Replication to a HP StoreOnce VSA you need at least three things:

In part I of this series I showed you the download and the deployment of the HP StoreOnce VSA. Part II showed you the configuration of two libraries and the connection of the backup server to this two tape libraries. Part III of this series covers the configuration of devices and meda pools in HP Data Protector 8.1. This article will not show the installation of HP Data Protector 8.1.

The HP StoreOnce VSA is a virtual storage appliance, that is designed for backups between 1 TB and 10 TB and it’s based on HPs StoreOnce technology. I wrote a short overview about the HP StoreOnce VSA some weeks ago. Take a look at this blog posting if you are not familiar with HP StoreOnce VSA. This article is focuses on the deployment of the HP StoreOnce VSA in a VMware vSphere environment. A second and third blog post covers the configuration of the HP StoreOnce VSA with HP Data Protector.

In part I of this series I showed you the download and the deployment of the HP StoreOnce VSA. But without further configuration, it’s only a VM that has 4 vCPUs, 16 GB memory and ~ 1,5 TB of disk space. Pretty much for a VM that can’t do anything for you. ;)

Creating a library

Open a browser and open the StoreOnce Management Console.

I would like to thank Calvin Zito for the donation of StoreVirtual NFR licenses to vExperts. This will help to spread the knowhow about this awesome product! If you are not a vExpert, you can download the StoreVirtual VSA for free and try it for 60 days. If you are a vExpert, ping Calvin on Twitter for a 1y NFR license.

This blog post covers the deployment of the current StoreVirtual VSA release (LeftHand OS 11). A second blog post covers the configuration using the CMC. Both posts are focused on LeftHand OS 11 and VMware vSphere. If you are searching for a deployment and configuration guide for LeftHand OS 9.x or 10 on VMware vSphere, take a look at this two blog posts from Craig Kilborn: Part 1 – How To Install & Configure HP StoreVirtual VSA On vSphere 5.1 & Part 2 – How To Install & Configure HP StoreVirtual VSA On vSphere 5.1. Another blog post that covers LeftHand OS 11 is from Hugo Strydom. Hugo wrote about what he did with his VSA (vExpert : What I did with my HP VSA). I wrote a blog post about the HP StoreVirtual VSA some weeks ago. If you are interested in some basics about the VSA, check my mentioned blog post.

Part I of this series covered the deployment, part II is dedicated to the configuration of the StoreVirtual VSA cluster. I assume that the Centralized Management Console (CMC) was installed. Start the CMC. If you see no systems unter “Available Systems”, client “Find” on the menu and then choose “Find Systems…”. A dialog will appear. Click “Add…” and enter the ip address of one of the earlier deployed VSA nodes. Repeat this until all deployed VSA nodes are added. Then click “Close”. Now you should have all available VSA nodes listed under “Available Systems”.