In a previous post, I explained how to install and configure HP Insight Control for VMware vCenter 7.1.1 to monitor and manage an HP LeftHand storage directly inside vCenter Web Client.
The HP software also adds VASA capabilities to vCenter, useful to create Storage Profiles based on effective storage capabilities directly acquired from the storage rather than by creating them by hand. As per VMware website:
VMware vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) is a new set of APIs that enable vCenter to see the capabilities of storage array LUNs and corresponding datastores. With visibility into capabilities underlying a datastore, it is much easier to select the appropriate disk for virtual machine placement. Storage capabilities, such as RAID level, Thin or Thick Provisioned, Replication State and much more can now be made visible within vCenter. VASA eliminates the need for maintaining complex spreadsheets detailing the storage capabilities of each LUN needed to guarantee the correct SLA to virtual machines. VASA forms the basis for a new capability in VMware vSphere, called “Profile Driven Storage”.
Once HP Insight Control is installed and configured as per my previous post, is time to configure VASA support. During my tests, I was stuck for more than two hours trying to find out the TCP port where the VASA provider was listening. Many blog posts on the internet had wrong informations, or at least referring to older versions of HP Insight. At the end, I found my answer by trying to reinstall HP Insight and choosing a custom installation rather than the normal install. Thanks to this, I saw this screen, where finally the VASA provider port was clearly indicated:
Once I solved this problem, the remaining part of the configuration is quite easy: inside the vCenter Web Client, I navigated to vCenter Server -> Manage -> Storage Providers:
Here, I added a new Storage Providers using the parameters as per the previous image. The use of a certificate is not mandatory, you can choose to accept the self-created default certificate and the new provider will appear into the list:
Next, it was time to create some Storage Profiles. To do so, from the home page I selected VM Storage Profiles. In this section, I first checked the new storage capabilities:
All these capabilities were added by the Storage Provider without any manual intervention. My LeftHand storage has 5 capabilities.
From here, I can now create several profiles using specific LeftHand capabilities. As an example, I created a new profile:
where I want to use a LUN with Snapshots, so I can move there those VMs I want to be regularly snapshotted and then restore via Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots as I described in a previous series of posts.