HP StoreVirtual Multi-Path Extension Module (MEM) for vSphere

Posted By Rajesh Radhakrishnan February 01 2018

With the release of LeftHand OS 12.0, HP have introduced a Multi-Path Extension Module to replace the previously recommended path selection policy being ‘Round Robin’ and Storage Array Type Plugin VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA .By default Round Robin would send 1,000 I/O down each path , Reference –  Verify Mutilpath Policy IOPS  .

HP StoreVirtual Multipathing Extension Module (MEM) for VMware vSphere – Reduce latency and improve performance in VMware vSphere environments. The MEM also optimizes data-path traffic in multi-site (or stretch-cluster) configurations .

Download MEM for vSphere 6.5

Here we explains with a example of 2 nodes cluster .

we have two cluster nodes, A and B. When the first volume is created it is ‘owned by a master node’ in this case ‘node A’.  When the second volume is created it is owned by ‘node B and so on, as shown below.

  • Volume 1 – Node A
  • Volume 2 – Node B
  • Volume 3 – Node A
  • Volume 4 – Node B

Using the recommended bonding method of ‘Adaptive Load Balancing’ SCSI read and write commands are issued on all NIC’s in the bond which can result in data being accessed from a non-authoritative node, which means a trip across the network to the authoritative node.

VMFocus HP StoreVirtual Diagram

This was rather inefficient and meant that random reads (which are served from disk) could be accessed from a non-authoritative node.  This is where the StoreVirtual Multi-Path Extension Module (MEM) steps in.  It has knowledge on where the data resides and ensures that all:

  • Read I/O’s are always serviced by the storage node that holds the authoritative data.
  • Write I/O’s are always serviced by the storage node that receives a mirror copy of the data ensuring data integrity.  Remaining copies are then forwarded to the remaining storage nodes.

This results in the following data flow architecture.

VMFocus HP StoreVirtual MEM Diagram

The installation guide for HP StoreVirtual Multipathing Deployment Guide is fairly straight forward.  The only issue I ran into was ‘could not find trusted signer’ when trying to install the vib.

This was resolved by adding –no-sig-check to the end of the command esxcli software vib install -v /HPMEM.vib –no-sig-check

Once installed, you will need to change the path selection policy for your datastores to HP_PSP_LH

 

More – StoreVirtual OS 12.7