Hitachi Block Storage driver support

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PowerVC provides integrated support for the Enterprise Hitachi Block Storage Driver (HBSD). PowerVC does not include or support the OpenStack HBSD.

Support

Requirements and recommendations

The PowerVC management server instance where Cinder is running should be in the same geographic location as the storage controller to reduce the effects of network latency on the management operations.

Requirements:

AIX® LKU support for Hitachi storage

Prerequisites
  • PowerVC version 1.4.4 fix pack 2 or later.
  • Minimum CM-REST server version v10.1.0-00 or later.
  • Minimum storage firmware version for VSP G1000, VSP G1500 or VSP F1500 is 80-06-74-XX/XX.
For any other storage model, refer to the Configuration Manager REST API Reference Guide to check the storage firmware version.

Restrictions and limitations

HBSD drivers have the following restrictions and limitations:
  • A volume should not be managed by more than one PowerVC instance. Hitachi hardware can fail volume clone operations if a clone operation is issued by more than one PowerVC management instance.
  • Each Fibre Channel port on the Hitachi controller can map up to 255 initiator Fibre Channel ports. Each PowerVM® NPIV adapter that is allocated to a virtual machine contains two virtual Fibre Channel ports. Therefore, each NPIV adapter consumes two initiator slots on a Hitachi Fibre Channel target port. For example, if a virtual machine has a total of four NPIV client adapters, eight initiator slots are consumed on the target port. In this scenario, the Hitachi Fibre Channel port can map volumes to 31 NPIV virtual machines.
  • Hitachi storage uses the lowest WWPN on the Virtual I/O Server for VSCSI connections as the name of host group when connecting a volume to a Virtual I/O Server. The HBSD host group naming convention is HBSD-lowercase_initiator_wwpn, where lowercase_initiator_wwpn is the lowest-valued NPIV or VSCSI WWPN, converted to lower case. For example, HBSD-c05076012345678a would be an acceptable name, but HBSD-C05076012345678A would not.

    If the Virtual I/O Server server VSCSI Fibre Channel ports are modified such that the lowest Fibre Channel WWPN changes, the host group names on the Hitachi controller must be renamed to match the expected HBSD-XXX naming convention.

  • For Hitachi storage providers, PowerVC can only determine the port status if it is cabled and active on a managed Fibre Channel fabric. Otherwise, the port status will be displayed as Unknown.
  • Refer to Hitachi documentation to determine the number of cascade thin image copies your Hitachi storage controller can support from a single volume. The number of supported cascade thin image copies limits the number of possible parallel deployments from a single volume. Creating multiple images from a single volume does not increase the number of cascade thin image copies the controller can support from a volume.
  • Hitachi only supports 32 characters of summary (sometimes called the title or nickname) field for volumes. This means that volumes that are generated by PowerVC and are then later managed by a different PowerVC server instance will be managed with a volume name that is truncated from the original volume name.

    If a virtual machine is managed with multiple volumes attached, you might need to use other properties to properly distinguish between the volumes. For example, the volume size or the Storage provider volume ID, which is the LDEV number for the volume on the Hitachi array.

  • Consult Hitachi for the scaling limits associated with your Hitachi storage array and the number of concurrent operations that your Hitachi storage array is capable of processing.
  • Refer to the below table for supported LDEV ranges:
    Table 2. Maximum number of LUNS / LDEV ranges supported
    Hitachi model Maximum number of supported LUNS / LDEV range
    VSP G200 2048
    VSP G400, VSP G600 4096
    VSP G350, VSP G800, VSP F350 16384
    VSP G370, VSP F370 32768
    VSP G700, VSP F700 49152
    VSP G900, VSP G1000, VSP G1500, VSP F900, VSP F1500 65280