HP P2000 iscsi SAN (idiots guide)

G1, G2 or G3 ?

G3

Config, is all the same.

do you have dual controllers?

Yes it will have dual controllers.

Cheers hancock, very useful.  My other concern is the SAN config side of things....

is pretty simple to configure. Just remember that one diskgroup only can be handled by one controllor. So depending on the amount of disks and space needs you can split it between the controllors. For the rest read the guide well about failover configuration. (meaning ip adressing and such.)

Have you logged into the Web GUI yet?

Decided what RAID and Spares you are going to use and create?

was planning on having one volume/array setup.

are these sans clever enough to hot add disks to LUNs/volumes or are they the same setup as a typical server RAID i.e. you would only add the disk as an independent disk?

not logged in as not bought it yet!

Yes you can extend but they are not the fastest one in that part.

fastest in terms of adding the disk or in terms of after the disk has been added (extended data)?

Extending an ARRAY on a P2000 can take weeks or days to complete.

ok cool.

In terms of connectivity of the 1gb ethernet ports on the SAN, i see a lot of info showing use of different ip address ranges.  i.e. host = 192.168.1.10 and san iscsi ip = 192.168.10.10 or even a different class ie. 10.*.*.*.
Does it have to be configured this way?

The SAN will have 2 controllers with 4x ports and the 2 hosts will have 4x ethernet ports also.

Can i setup as:

host 1 - nic0&1 = 192.168.1.10
host 1 - nic2&3 = 192.168.1.11

host 2 - nic0&1 = 192.168.1.12
host 2 - nic2&3 = 192.168.1.13

SAN ctrlr 1 - nic 0&1 = 192.168.1.101
SAN ctrlr 1 - nic 2&3 = 192.168.1.111

SAN ctrlr 2 - nic 0&1 = 192.168.1.112
SAN ctrlr 2 - nic 2&3 = 192.168.1.113

Then ethernet leads load balanced over 2x switches and 2x hosts?

Yes, you may want to look at the User Guides and Installations Guides, because a Controller can own a vdisk.

Here's the Configuration Guide, which has some good tips, before it arrives to think about.

HP P2000 G3 Configuration Guide

What about using say an HP MSA70 - as shared storage?
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12652_div/12652_div.HTML

MSA70 needs to be connected to an enclosure like a P2000.

But there is or was a P2000, which is a DAS, which can be connected directly to servers.

see here

http://bizsupport1.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c02254382/c02254382.pdf

But you need to confirm with HP if it's supported for VMware ESXi 5.0. It seems to have disappeared from the VMware HCL.