I got my hands on an HP MSA2012i and thought I'd share some of the configuration screens with you. Part of the HP StorageWorks 2000 Modular Smart Array family, this particular model is the iSCSI model with one controller (it is not meant for production so we did not need the 2nd controller). The MSA2012i has twelve SAS drive bays for 3.5 inch disks and we filled it with 146GB 15K disks. There are two other models: one fibre channel and one SAS.
Each controller has three ethernet ports, one for management and two for data access. I connected the management port to our network and pointed my browser to the IP address assigned by our DHCP server. After logging in with username manage and password !manage (defaults) the configuration can start.
The first thing to do is to configure the ethernet ports. To configure the data ports, go to General Config and then host port configuration:
The addresses above (port 0 and port 1) are used for the iSCSI discovery process and of course disk access as well. In the Microsoft iSCSI initiator for example, you would set one of these (or both) in the Discovery tab:
The MSA2000 works with the concept of vdisks and volumes. A vdisk is nothing more than a collection of physical disks configured with some protection level (RAID5, RAID10, ...) and optional spare disk(s). There are two ways to create a vdisk:
- Automatic virtual disk creation (policy-based)
- Manual virtual disk creation (detail-based)
The policy-based method just asks you for a fault tolerance level (none=RAID0, medium=RAID5 or high=RAID50), the size of the vdisk in GB and the number of volumes to create in the vdisk.
I will show manual disk creation to create a vdisk with 11 disks and one spare (no best practice or anything, just demo). The first screen asks for the vdisk name and the RAID level (RAID0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 50):
The second screen asks for the disks and whether or not you want spare drives:
The third screen asks for the spare disk(s):
After clicking continue, a summary is shown with a button to create the vdisk:
After clicking Create Virtual Disk, the vdisk will be created and initialized. Initialization can take a long time but during that time volumes can already be created and used.
The next thing to do is to create volumes. Let's create a 100GB volume on the vdisk we just created. From the Volume Management section at the left there is the add volume option. In the screenshot below, a volume of 100GB is created without assigning a LUN number. When you assign a LUN number you present the LUN globally. If you do not want that you set LUN to NONE and assign the volume to a host from the volume mapping link.
After clicking Add Volume the volume is shown in the volume map of the vdisk:
To map the volume to a host:
Of course, hosts don't just magically appear in the above list. You can add hosts manually (there is a link somewhere in the menu at the left) or make them appear by using the iSCSI initiator on the host to connect to the MSA target. When the volume is mapped to the host it will appear if the iSCSI initiator was configured correctly:
As you can see, configuration is very simple although not as easy as an Equallogic box, a reference for configuration simplicity. I did notice one bug though and that is the fact that every other vdisk is owned by the second (in our case, non existent) controller. This might be solved by a more recent firmware though.
