Configuring HP MSA San to add VDISK

Adding a VDisk to a HP SAN, in this case a HP2312, is fairly easy.

– Add physical disks in the empty slot
– Login to the web management interface
– Click on Vdisks and go to Provisioning – Create VDISK
– Use RAID 5 if you need the space, Use RAID 10 if you need the space. Both are fault tolerant.  Best thing here is to use a spare disk if you want to be really save. The spare disk will activate if one of the raid disk fails and will take the role of that disk. So you can buy a new disk to use as a spare.

– Create the VDISK and after that create a Volume on that disk.
– If you want to use the disk immediately on your environment, if it is a directly connected Server or a HyperVisor you can choose to use Online initialization. It takes longer to initialize than offline initialization. Probably the performance of that disk is degraded until it is finished.
– You need to MAP the Volume to the ports of the MSA. You can choose to use all ports.

SAN01-

– The host machine will now see your disk

– With VMware ESX, go to Host – Configuration – Storage. Choose Add Storage en follow the wizard to add the new disk.esx-storage

– In Windows Server you can go to disk manager and mark the disk as online, then initialize the disk and create a volume on it.

diskmanager