InfoSight

Discover Storage News Wrap Up

Last week at HPE Discover there was a series of storage announcements for the 3PAR and Nimble platform plus more. In this post we will run through the announcements.

Storage Class Memory

Storage class memory has been announced for 3PAR and Nimble. Storage Class Memory memory (SCM) was intended to bridge the gap between DRAM and NAND flash found in current generation SSD’s. DRAM is fast memory but does not scale and is expensive, NAND flash does scale but does not deliver the same performance. Intel have developed their Optane product which sits in this middle ground of performance and cost between SSD and NAND flash.

The Intel Optane device will be NVMe connected and act as an extension to the onboard controller cache. Other vendors such as Pure have added NVMe drives into the system but HPE have focused on adding the NVMe storage within the controller as they believe that the key bottleneck in flash systems is at the controller level and not disk. The additional cache creates quicker response times and also reduces the load on back end disks as the amount of IO served served here is reduced. Phillip Sellers has written an in-depth piece looking at the addition of SCM to Nimble and 3PAR.

There was a number of announcements around the InfoSight platform. First up was 3PAR performance insights which allows a performance view of not only your storage but also the VMware layer. We’ve discussed this in detail previously including how to implement it, but in short this is free for customers and allows deep insights into your VMware environment such as being able to find VMs with the highest resource utilisation.

The Nimble storage platform also benefited from a couple of InfoSight enhancements. Nimble Resource planner allows load modelling. As a storage admin I really like the sound of this as so often we don’t know what the impact of an additional workload will be until it’s deployed. The modelling software predicts the impact both in terms of performance and capacity, below is an example of running through this

Choosing workload to model

Impact on capacity is modelled

Also modelled is the impact on CPU and cache

Nimble cross stack analytics brings enhancements to the performance recommendations already delivered by InfoSight. The focus of this new feature is bring specific AI driven recommendations to the environment. An example of the type of recommendation is shown in the screenshot below

The InfoSight product is still owned by the storage segment of HPE but its expansion into other products is continuing at a pace. One of HPE’s key objective is to deliver a cloud like experience and make things consumable as services. InfoSight is a key part of this strategy ensuring uptime and proactive recommendations to the environment to eliminate issues before they occur.

You can see a summary of the InfoSight announcements in this chalk talk

Nimble Peer Persistence

Synchronous replication was added as a feature to the Nimble storage platform. The feature is being called Peer Persistence since HPE are also introducing support for metro clusters at the same time. I have covered Peer Persistence in-depth previously for 3PAR, it essentially allows for the creation of stretched cluster across geographically separate data centres. The Nimble implementation of Peer Persistence will initially support metro clusters for SQL and VMware.

Cloud Volumes Enhancements

Nimble Cloud Volumes were announced a couple of years ago. These cloud volumes offer block storage with the maturity and depth of services you would expect to see on premise for cloud. Announced this time round was the support of containerized workloads using both Docker and Kubernetes. Also announced was extended regional support so cloud volumes will be available for the UK and Ireland in 2019.

Cohesity

HPE have also enhanced their relationship with secondary data platform Cohesity. Cohesity is available bundled with Proliant Gen10 servers through HPE partners. These validated Cohesity and HPE bundles have added support for HPE Apollo and HPE DL380 servers

You can see a further summary of announcements in this blog post from Calvin Zito

December 5, 2018

Richard ArnoldLeave a comment

Configuring 3PAR with InfoSight

HPE previously announced the availability of HPE InfoSight for 3PAR. This guest post by Armin Kerl runs through the process of setting up 3PAR Cross-stack Analytics for VMware. This allows a number of insights into the performance of VM’s held on the storage.

HPE 3PAR InfoSight PERQUISITES

Hello 3PAR Guys, today I will show you how to enable VMware integration in HPE InfoSight. Before you register your system in InfoSight you need the following prerequisites in place:

3PAR Call Home enabled, as I describe here
An active support contract is in place, which you can verify with the HPE Warranty Checker
Additionally if you wish use Cross-stack Analytics for VMware the following requirements apply:
- Minimum 3PAR OS 3.2.2 MU4 minimum with Service Processor version 4.4 MU7 or later
- 3PAR OS 3.3.1 with Service Processor 5.0 MU3 or later
- 3PAR Service Processor must be configured to use the RDA Transport Agent (SSA is not supported)
- VMware vCenter versions 5.5, 6.0 or 6.5

High-level setup steps

If the above requirements are in place you will then be able to complete the following high level steps to get InfoSight with cross-stack analytics.

Register the system with InfoSight
Configure VMware integration in the Service Processor
Ensure that the RDA transport mode is used for the Service Processor

We will run through these steps in the next sections:

Registering system with InfoSight

Logon to InfoSight with your HPE passport ID
Click on the HPE 3PAR StoreServ / StoreOnce Register Systems link on the Welcome Page (Settings > Register Systems). It’s easiest if you create
You will then choose a system group you want to assign the device to. This allows you to group all your organisations devices
You will then be presented with a System Group Registration Token to copy and paste onto each 3PAR to perform registration. You will see a full set of instructions on how to do this, with the choice of doing this via CLI, SSMC and IMC.

Integrating the 3PAR Service Processor with vCentre

The exact steps you need to take will depend on the version of the Service Processor you are running. First we look at doing this with service processor 5.0.3

vCentre integration Service Processor 5.0.3

1 Once you are logged into your Service Processor you can see the firmware version of the service processor like in the screenshot below

2 Now go to Systems from the main menu

3 From the Actions Menu chose Edit System

3 Choose VMware integration

4 Choose Add vCenter. Enter IP address, password and other relevant information for your vCenter. The account supplied needs to have read only access to the vCentre

vCentre integration Service Processor 4.x

Login to SPOCC
Select SPmaint from the Main Menu and choose Option 3 “StoreServ Configuration Management”
Choose “Add StoreServ” then “Add vCenter”
Supply the required information and click add. The account supplied needs to have read only access to the vCentre

RDA transport mode

If you got this Message:

Than the RDA Transport Protocol is not active, and the SP uses the old SSA transfer agent. This happens mostly, if you have updated the Service Processor from 4.4 to 5.0. To solve this:

Logon to the Service Processor with the “hpepartner” Account and go to “Edit SP configuration”.

Now under Support change from SSA to RDA Transport Agent.

Check if Call Home Transfer is still working, it may be the RDA needs different firewall exceptions on your site.

Note that Service Processor 4.x releases require HPE Support to modify the configuration from Secure Service Agent (SSA) to Remote Device Access (RDA).

Checking Infosight is integrating with vCentre

The setup steps are now complete we can now check everything is working as expected.

In Activity, we see now VM Collections running.

To be able to view the collected stats we need to wait 2-4 hours then log onto InfoSight and click “VM Details”:

Now you get lots of VM to Storage related information:

For further information on the setup process look at the HPE Infosight For 3PAR Quickstart Guide v1.4

In this previous post available you can see more examples other reports InfoSight will make available. That is all the steps you need to configure 3PAR with InfoSight.

Thanks to the HPE InfoSight team for reaching out with additional information to support this post.

August 15, 2018August 15, 2018

Richard Arnold8 Comments

3PAR & InfoSight

InfoSIght is now available for 3PAR to get up and running check out my 3PAR and InfoSight Setup Guide

Whilst at HPE Discover I managed to nab some screenshots of the new 3PAR implementation of InfoSight. You can read my post about all the InfoSight announcements.

To get InfoSight up and running with 3PAR you will need a have a minimum of 3PAR OS version 2.2.x and Service Processor (SP) version 2.4.2, since this is a very old release this should allow most customers access. If however you wish to have the the integration with VMware the requirements are a little more stringent you need to be running 3PAR OS 3.3.1, have an active support contract and have the 3PAR communicating back to base and a service processor on 5.0 MU3. The initial release, available in January will focus on delivering greater insight into the performance of VM’s on the storage. This is achieved by adding additional functionality to the Service Processor which will allow it to talk to the vCentre in your environment. Once you have your 3PAR setup with InfoSight you will see two key areas of information, storage information which today will be the same as information being retrieved from StoreFront remote. Secondly you will see the virtualisation layer info being pulled back from vCentre.

Screenshots

Below is the screenshots I managed to gather of InfoSight with 3PAR:

Key host storage performance stats – IOPS, latency and throughput

More typical storage related information

High level VM overview

The following screens allow “noisy neighbour analysis”. They look at various stats to identify which VMs are working your environment the hardest and potentially causing contention in the environment.

Top VMs by latency and IOPs

Top VMs by CPU usage

Top VMs by data usage

This menu shows all the contention reports available

Seen the 3PAR simulator video setup guide?

December 12, 2017August 7, 2018

Richard Arnold5 Comments