About

Welcome to d8taDude.com, a tech blog ran by Richard T Arnold covering what’s hot in enterprise technology .  Storage is of particular interest, there are loads of HPE 3PAR resources on the blog! d8taDude.com is now an open blogging platform if you wish to get your name out there in front of thousands of people you can submit a guest post.

I am a vExpert and was voted in the top 5 storage bloggers and top 10 independent bloggers in the annual top vBlog poll. I live in the UK with my wife and two kids. I like having a rest from the kids in the gym and enjoy the outdoors. You can learn more about me by connecting on LinkedIn.

If you are interested in consultancy, advertising, HPE parts and systems or any other business opportunities please get in touch via the form on the work with me page.

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40 thoughts on “About

  1. Hello.

    Can you answer my question on this?

    Where are you doing the work? do you HP??

    Sorry that I can’t speak English well..

    Answer please.

    Thanks.

    1. Hi welcome to 3ParDude. No I don’t work for HP, I work for an IT service provider and regularly work with 3Par as part of my role. 3ParDude is about sharing my experiences with the wider community.

  2. Hi 3pardude, Just wanted to know your opinion on using VV sets. Alot of people have seemed to moved away from them due to administrative overhead and not having the option of manually choosing a LUN ID. Should we continue to use them or just use VV’s that are exported to Host Sets.

    1. Great question and I think the answer is it depends and personnel preference. I think life is simpler without VV Sets but what would make me implement them is that certain 3PAR features rely on them and it’s better to future proof your design in case these features are used later. For example I have a client that now wants to use the 3PAR Priority Optimization feature which relies on volume sets to apply settings. This customer has a large system with lots of virtual volumes and the process of transferring from individual volumes to volume sets is going to be time consuming. Other features such as Adaptive Optimization also can be set via volume set.

      In summary for small environments you want to keep simple individual exports is fine if there is any chance you will use a feature that relies on volume sets get it in your design from the start and future proof your system.

      1. VV Sets are very useful in a Virtual environment, especially when there are lot of VVs exported to a Host Set of ESX servers.

  3. Hello,

    I have a test T-Class 3PAR array and looking to update the code from 2.3.1 to the latest the T-Class will support. I always allowed HP to handle upgrades but since this older array is no longer under support I was wondering if you had any documentation or thoughts on the process assuming I can get the code needed. Not concerned about what is connected etc since its a test array. I appreciate your thoughts on this.

    1. Hi the latest the T class will support is 3PAR OS 3.1.3. 3.1.3 was the first version to be self upgradable so there should be instructions on how to do it but I would have thought HP would only release the docs and OS version to a customer with an active support contract. I would have a chat with HP and see if they will let you have 3.1.3.

  4. In 3PAR 101 part 1 you have described CPGs as being roughly analogous to RAID group and VV as analogous to Luns. What are logical disks analogous to. And finally in traditional arrays we have storage pools, what is the 3par equivalent to a storage pool.

    1. Good question. Logical disks are analogous to physical disks. I believe RAID groups and storage pools are just EMC terminology for RAID groups that have different properties. So for 3PAR both Raid groups and pools are similar to CPG’s.

  5. hey Dude, simple question: i’ve heard that 3Par (7200/8200) can support configuration that have only even number of disk is that true?

    1. Hi, simple answer yes the number of drives need to be balanced. You can see the disk load rules in 3PAR quick specs under the choose a disk section. You will see the rules include: Cages must contain a min of 2 drives. a min of 8 drives are required for any new drive type, a min of 4 drives per controller pair or 2 per enclosure (whichever is larger), disks should be balanced across all cages.

  6. Good Morning 3ParDude! We run a 3PAR 7200 attached to a Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Cluster and I was just wondering if you have ever had any luck defraging CSV volumes from a 3par. Whenever we try to defrag a CSV that resides on the 3PAR we get the following error in powershell: the slab consolidation / trim operation cannot be performed because the volume alignment is invalid. We have another small 2 node cluster running Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and using an HP MSA as the storage and we can defrag the CSV’s on that just fine.

    So just wondering if you have run across this before. Going to open up a ticket with HP today as well.

    Thank you!

    1. I Would be interested to hear what HP said to you. Generally defragging any SAN is not recommended as they have their own processes to deal with fragmentation and a defrag could cause more issues than it fixes.

  7. You were correct. HP came back and said the following:

    HPE doesn’t not recommend or support defragging CSVs on a 3PARS from an External application.

    On the 3PAR itself, TUNEVV & COMPACTCPG can be ran on the SSMC/IMC or CLI if you want to defrag.

    Speaking with some of our techs here, this process is not supported.

    Glad I checked.

  8. Hi, the release notes for 3.2.2 state that “the compactcpg command runs automatically”, I’m finding it hard to find any information on when and/or how often. Can you help? Thanks

    1. My reading of that is that it resolved an issue where that was happening rather than added a feature. I believe the only time you can set it to run automatically is as part of AO with the -compact switch.

  9. Hello 3PARdude,

    Great work with this blog, for a newbie regarding the 3PAR it helped a lot.

    I have a question regarding the VV sets. I have a VV set on a 3PAR F400 which according to the system was automatically created and I couldn’t find a way to delete it until now.

    The set is not exported and it is not using any VLUN’s. The only VV contained by the set cannot be removed from it because it is automatically created.

    Have you encountered this issue working with 3PAR until now? What would you advise?

    Thank you in advance,
    Radu

    1. Thanks for the feedback!

      Although the VVset does not have volumes exported. It could still be presented to a host, in an AO, remote copy or AFC config. Check it is not in use any where then you should be able to delete.

  10. Hi Richard,
    Have a question no one can answer me, hope you can.
    Can you connect M6710 directly to 2 hosts for shared storage (for use in MS Cluster for example) with couple of HBA’s?

    I cant find the answer to this conundrum anywhere.
    Hope you can help.

    Boris

  11. Hi all, I am new to HP 3PAR and also not specific to storage background i am here to just update the 3pardude that all the information is helping me to learn and understand the HO 3Par…Thanks

  12. Dear Richard,

    I had a 3par 7400 with 17 enclosures and os version is 3.2.1.484 with 1 faulty node(Node0). I tried to replace it with a used controller as a spare, after replacement the controller led become steady green which means it couldn’t join the cluster. so we tried to shutdown the cluster and powered off and on the box base on the documentation. after power on the 4th node (NODE 3) also become faulty and dead. so after a quit long time we tried to change the 4th node (Node3) base on replacement document, same as Node0 happened to it. I tried to wipe out the configuration and I did the deinstallation the system but still the Node1 and Node2 can joined the cluster. then I tried to rescue both nodes one by one since both have already used in some other systems and rescue actually finished successfully and the have got correct box serial number and hostname but still they couldn’t join the cluster and their interconnect ports are amber.

    please help

    thanks in advance

    Mike Makers

    1. Hi, it sounds like you are doing the right kind of thing. You should just put in the new node and the build will start automatically. If this is not working I would suggest contacting HPE for further support and lower level diagnostics.

  13. Hello Brother,
    I am Sajjad from Bangladesh. I worked in a Bank where a 3PAR is recently purchased. Our vendor is already implement it. Now i am interested to learn about 3PAR. I am totally new in storage system. So I need suggestion from you. Can you please suggest me what is the pre- requisite to learn 3PAR and also from where should i start to learn about it? which things i need to know to operate this 3PAR?

    Hope will get your reply soon. Thank you.

  14. Hi Richard,

    Could you help with this question please? Maybe i can buy you a London beer or a Tea 🙂

    Currently got a project to migrate off of old NAS Storage (EMC Celerra) used as a filer for users home drives etc… and i wanted to use the HP 3PAR Online Utility Program to migrate all the shares/data from the EMC to the 3PAR 20 series.

    Could it be done this way ?

    Thanks,

    Simon

    1. CX4-480 🙂 so it is supported now just about those pesky file shares and their preservation? I imagine because it’s a xfer that everything is migrated …. just want some reassurance and also advice as to is this the easiest, best way to do this?

  15. Hi Richard,
    Am supporting 3par 8440 for my customer and we are going to add additional 16*3.84TB SSD’s to it. Could you please provide me the steps to discover those on SSMC and further adding them to existing CPG’s for load balancing across VV’s.

    1. Once the disk are in you will just need to run an admithw. Once the system recognises the new disks they will be automatically added to CPG’s, unless you have set specific filters

    1. Hi Mike

      Thanks for the feedback.

      Yes the best way to wipe a 3PAR is to re-run the OOB setup as suggested in the article you mention. But please note it will depend how deep you want to go on the wipe and the standards you have in your organisation for disposal of equipment.

      Richard

  16. hello
    i have 3PAR 7450 as used box not a new one
    i delete the default CPG by mistake , i thought i can create a new CPG instead it .. but when i tried to create a new one i got this Error Message (available free space in system is less than 32gb).
    how i can solve this issue .. did OOB fix this ?
    or what the right steps i can do
    thanks.

    1. This would probably indicate that you have chosen cage level availability but don’t have enough disk shelves to support it

  17. Hi 3parguy,

    I am a refurbisher. Could you please share a procedure on how to remove all user condiguration on 3PAR system like 7200 and 7400? All IPs, names i mean resetting it back to factory default.

    Thanks in advance!

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