Two 3PAR StoreServs running in a Peer Persistence setup lost the connection to the Quorum Witness appliance. The appliance is an important part of a 3PAR Peer Persistence setup, because it acts as a tie-breaker in a split-brain scenario.
While analyzing this issue, I saw this message in the 3PAR Management Console:
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
In addition to that, the customer got e-mails that the 3PAR StoreServ arrays lost the connection to the Quorum Witness appliance.
I wanted to retire my Synology DS414slim, and switch completely to vSAN. Okay, no big deal. Many folks use vSAN in their lab. But I’d like to explain why I moved to vSAN and why this move failed. I think some of my thoughts are also applicable for customer environments.
So far, I used a Synology DS414slim with three Crucial M550 480 GB SSDs (RAID 5) as my main lab storage.
Customers that use HPE 3PAR StoreServs with 3PAR OS 3.2.1 or 3.2.2 and VMware ESXi 5.5 U2 or later, might notice one or more of the following symptoms:
hosts lose connectivity to a VMFS5 datastore hosts disconnect from the vCenter VMs hang during I/O operations you see the messages like these in the vobd.log or vCenter Events tab Lost access to volume due to connectivity issues. Recovery attempt is in progress and the outcome will be reported shortly
HPE StoreVirtual is a scale-out storage platform, that is designed to meet the needs of virtualized environments. It’s based on LeftHand OS and because the magic is a piece of software, HPE StoreVirtual is available as HPE ProLiant/ BladeSystem-based hardware, or as Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) for VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM. It comes with an all-inclusive enterprise feature set. This feature set provides
Storage clustering Network RAID Thin Provisioning (with support for space reclamation) Snapshots Asynchronous and synchronous replication across multiple sites Automated software upgrades and self-healing storage Adaptive Optimization (Tiering) The license is alway all-inclusive.
Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs are all the rage. REST was defined by Roy Thomas Fielding in his PhD dissertation “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures". The architectural style of REST describes six constraints:
Uniform interface Stateless Cacheable Client - Server communication Layered system Code on demand RESTful APIs typically use HTTP and HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.) to send data to, or retrieve data from remote systems.
Careful preparation is a key element to success. If you restart a storage controller, or even the whole storage, you should be very sure that all ESXi hosts have enough paths to every datstore. Sure, you can use the VMware vSphere C# client or the Web Client to check every host and every datastore. But if you have a large cluster with a dozen datastores and some Raw Device Mappings (RDMs), this can take a looooong time.
Some days ago, I blogged about the new HP StoreOnce software release 3.13.0. This release included several fixes. One fix wasn’t mentioned by me, although it’s interesting.
Fixed issue where Windows 2012 R2 built-in native backup was not supported with 3.12.x software (BZ 61232) Windows Server Backup (WSB) is part of Windows Server since Windows Server 2008. WSB can create bare metal backups and recover those backups. The same applies to system state backups, file level backups, Hyper-V VMs, Exchange etc.
With the general availability of PernixData FVP 3.1, PernixData released the first version of PernixData Architect.
One of the biggest problems today is, that management tools are often focused on deployment and monitoring of applications or infrastructure. This doesn’t lead to a holistic view over applications and related data center infrastructure. You have to monitor at several points within the application stack and even then, you won’t get a holistic view.
Since september 2015, the latest version of HP StoreOnce backup system software is available. The latest release 3.13.0 is available for HP StoreOnce VSA, 6500, B6200 multi-node and all single node systems running software version 3.x. This also applies to some D2D 2500, 4100 and 4300 single-node backup systems running software versions 2.x. Make sure that you take a look into customer notice c03729283 for details on performing the conversion.
When you install DataCore SANsymphony-V (SSV), you will be asked during the setup to allow the installation of some special drivers. DataCore SANSymphony-V needs this drivers to act as a storage target for hosts and other storage servers. Usually you have three different port roles in a DataCore SSV setup:
Frontend Ports (FE) Mirror Ports (MR) Backend Ports (BE) Frontend (FE) ports act only in target-only mode. These ports will be disabled, if you stop a DataCore storage server.
