HP has recently released the latest version of their Insight Control, numbered 7.1.1. As per the official webpage: The HP Insight Control extension for VMware vCenter Server delivers powerful HP hardware management capabilities to virtualization administrators, enabling comprehensive deployment, provisioning, monitoring, remote control and power optimization directly from the vCenter console.
One of the most interesting feature of this new release is the integration with vCenter 5.1 Web Interface, and the possibility to run iLO remote console directly from vCenter. Also, if you are using one of the supported storage models and you have vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses, you can leverage VASA libraries for Storage Profiles, since Insight Control acts as a storage provider for vCenter. Also this new release officially supports LeftHand OS 10.0 and the new 3Par StoreServ 7000 series.
Since my lab has also some LeftHand VSA and HP Proliant servers, both supported by Insight Control, I went to install it and see how it works.
Installation
The install package can be used on any Windows server. I decided to use my vCenter server, since it is also holding the Web Client.
If you choose a custom install, you can decide to use server module, storage module, or both, depending on what HP hardware you have:
I left most of the choices with default values, one interesting configuration options is about permissions:
You can map one-to-one vSphere administrators with new Storage Administrators, or configure it in a different way. I left the default and moved on.
Storage Administration Portal
After the installer has completed, I was offered to automatically launch the Storage Module for vCenter Storage Administration Portal. As I said before, I have some LeftHand VSA in my lab, so I choosed yes to go and configure them:
Here, you can login with one of your vCenter Administrator users. By choosing the Add button, you start a wizard. In the first step, you can choose which type of storage you own. This is the list of the supported models:
In the next step, depending of the storage model you choosed, the wizard will ask you for other parameters like IP address of the management interface (so you must check before the server you installed HP Insight onto has network connectivity with the storage management interface itself) and credentials. After the wizard has discovered the storage like my LeftHand cluster here:
the storage itself is added to the Portal:
One warning: the Portal is not able to update automatically any configuration change of a LeftHand cluster like adding or removing nodes. If you change something, you need to come back here and issue a refresh of the retrieved informations.
After configuring the storage, there is anything else we can do here, so move on to the vCenter Web interface.
vSphere Web Client Integration
Once logged into the Web Interface, the plugin is ready to show you additional information about the storage system, and offer you new tools. For example, if you go into the datastore section and open one of the LUN provided by the LeftHand / StoreVirtual storage, you can see a screen like this:
There are as you can see dedicated commands to manage the datastore from inside vCenter, and also a summary of the thin provisioning savings.
With HP Insight Control, you can also manage servers, and provide information to VASA libraries in order to get full advantage of the Storage Profiles. In another post, I will show you how to configure and use both.