Planning for Hitachi Global-Active Device (GAD)

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PowerVC allows users to register their Hitachi Global-Active Device (GAD) in PowerVC. If your environment has the Hitachi storage, you can configure the Hitachi GAD to create and maintain synchronous, remote copies of data volumes.

The Hitachi GAD provides load balancing and failover. PowerVC will display a single volume for the mirrored pair on the user interface. Hitachi GAD provides you the following benefits:
  • Continuous server I/O when a failure prevents access to a data volume.
  • Server failover and failback without storage impact.
  • Load balancing through migration of virtual storage machines without storage impact.

Before using Hitachi Global-Active Device

Hitachi GAD license needs to be installed on both primary and secondary storage devices. Hitachi storage volumes must be cabled and preconfigured for GAD, with required quorum-disk and available path groups. PowerVC does not configure the GAD storage, instead it uses the existing GAD configured storage.

Configuring Hitachi Global-active device

Follow these steps to configure Hitachi GAD with PowerVC:
  1. Click the Add Global-Active Device button on the already registered Hitachi storage provider details page. You will be prompted to provide the secondary Hitachi storage device details. Provide Secondary storage IP/Hostname with credentials and CM-REST server IP with port 23451 or Direct REST API with port 443.
  2. After providing the secondary storage device details, click Connect. Provide the path group ID and the quorum disk ID details.
  3. Specify the Fibre Channel ports available.
  4. Select a storage pool for GAD copies of the volume.
  5. Click Add Global-Active Device button.

For each Global-Active Device, PowerVC creates a default storage template. You can make the GAD storage template as default or rename the template after GAD is configured successfully.

PowerVC supports all virtual machine life cycle operations with Hitachi GAD. Also, PowerVC allows creating both GAD and non-GAD volumes based on the storage template used. Expanding a GAD volume which is In-Use is not supported.