Planning for IBM FlashSystem and Storwize family storage

PowerVC supports IBM FlashSystem and Storwize family systems as a fully integrated driver.

PowerVC supports complete VM and volume lifecycle management along with replication capabilities like Global Mirror, Global Mirror Change volumes, and HyperSwap®. HyperSwap is a high availability feature for IBM Storwize that provides dual-site, active-active access to a volume. PowerVC provides the capability to register and manage HyperSwap volumes. For more details, see Global mirror feature on IBM Storwize and HyperSwap feature on IBM Storwize.

PowerVC provides additional support to add data reduction pool for thin-provisioned and compressed volumes.

You can also configure QoS throttling parameters for the volume throughput.

For supported models, requirements, and restrictions, refer to OpenStack support summary.

You can add data reduction pool for thin-provisioned and compressed volumes while using the Storwize Cinder driver.

NPIV connected Storwize devices and zoning

When using NPIV connectivity, the initiator and target WWPNs that are logged in to the fabrics are the candidates used for zoning. With NPIV connectivity on a Storwize device, each physical Fibre Channel port has an associated virtual Fibre Channel port. The SVC fctargetmode property on an IO group determines the NPIV behavior of an IO group. Therefore, the value for this property also determines the candidates for zoning as described below. For instructions to set the mode on the IO group, see N_Port ID Virtualization configuration in the Storwize Knowledge Center. If you change the mode on the IO group, you must restart Cinder services on PowerVC.

disabled

Only the physical Fibre Channel ports are logged in to the connected fabrics. If you change the mode to disabled from enabled or transitional, any virtual machines or Virtual I/O Servers that are using the virtual ports will lose access to their volumes.

transition

Both the physical and the virtual Fibre Channel ports are logged in to the connected fabrics. If you want only the virtual ports to be used, add the physical ports' WWPNs to

powervc-config
storage powervc_target_wwpn_blacklist

. This command maintains a list of ports that will not be used for zoning.

enabled

Both the physical and virtual Fibre Channel ports are logged in to the fabrics. However, the IO group only services IO requests on the virtual Fibre Channel ports. After changing the mode to enabled, any virtual machines or Virtual I/O Servers that are using physical Fibre Channel ports will lose access to their volumes.

Onboarding QoS IO throttle enabled volumes

If the QoS IO throttle values, qos:IOThrottling and qos:IOThrottling_unit are set for an IBM Storwize, and the storage templates for the same storage provider and storage pool has the volumes present in PowerVC, then those storage templates are automatically assigned on managing the volume in PowerVC. If the QoS IO throttle value is not set for the volume, no storage template is assigned by default.

For more information, see Volume type options when creating an IBM Storwize provider.

For information about PowerVC Storwize QoS Throttling, refer to the PowerVC Storwize QoS Throttling blog.