Executive White Paper > Hewlett-Packard
Using HP 3PAR Peer Persistence to Achieve
Non-Disruptive High Availability and Load Balancing
in VMware vSphere Environments
High availability for all virtualized applications locally or in the cloud is the aspiration of almost every enterprise
regardless of its size. It is time to make that dream a reality. Using HP 3PAR StoreServ, its Peer Persistence
software and VMware vSphere vMotion and Metro Storage Clusters, enterprises are closer than ever to delivering
on this higher form of high availability.
Company
Hewlett-Packard Company
3000 Hanover Street
Palo Alto CA 94304-1185
(650)857-1501
Founded 1939
www.hp.com
Industry
Computer Systems
BCP Challenges
• Difficult to reliably execute upon and
repeat successes of BCP tests
• Resources at secondary sites sit idle or
remain heavily underutilized
• BCP resources consume ongoing
operating expenses
• New cloud technologies making BCP
and waiting for recoveries obsolete
Solution
• HP 3PAR StoreServ with Peer Persistence,
VMware vSphere vMotion and MSC
HA Benefits
• VMs automatically and non-disruptively
recover to the secondary site should the
storage array fail
• Entire sites can automatically failover to
a recovery site
• Failovers and failbacks can occur at any
time eliminating concerns about the
solution’s viability
• Load balance VMs across sites
eliminating idling resources and
stranded capacity
• Easily extend into the cloud using any
of HP service provider partners
By DCIG Lead Analyst Jerome M Wendt
Enterprises of all sizes are coming to the realization that they should focus on uptime’s
value as opposed to downtime’s costs. As this transition in thinking occurs, applying high
availability (HA) and application load balancing features for their virtualized environments
extend beyond their primary data center to other data centers and even the cloud. The HP
3PAR StoreServ with its Peer Persistence feature gives enterprises access to these HA
and load balancing features they seek so they may keep their VMware environment online
all the time while better utilizing their available physical resources.
BCP is not HA
Business continuity planning (BCP) is already a mainstay at many midsized enterprises. An
AT&T 2012 online survey of IT executives from organizations throughout the United States
found that over 80% of them, to include businesses with revenues of no more than
$25 million, have BCP in place.1 These survey respondents who have the primary respon-
sibility for BCP in their organizations also shared the following:
• 86% have BCP in place
• 63% fully tested it in the previous twelve months
• 29% have invoked it at some point in their past 2
The degree to which these organizations have deployed BCP is to be commended and is
certainly a vast improvement over what it has been in the past. However BCP is just the
beginning of the journey to arrive at a highly available environment, not the destination. The
results of this survey still leave serious questions as to:
• How successful was the test?
• How much of their data did they recover?
Enterprises are coming to the
• How long did the recovery take? conclusion that uninterrupted
• What number of IT staff was needed to execute application availability with
upon the recovery?
automated application failover
• How much did it cost? and failback is a better option
Even for those that did a BCP test in the last twelve than BCP.”
(12), six (6) or even two (2) months, this test does
—Jerome Wendt, DCIG Lead Analyst
not translate into assurances that their recovery will
work today. As any organization knows, IT environ-
ments—especially those that are virtualized—change very quickly. New applications and
VMs are constantly added. The IT staff that conducted the last test may no longer work at
the company. Hardware may have been upgraded or replaced. These changes create
uncertainty as to how recoverable their environment truly is.
Compounding the problem, enterprises are questioning BCP’s overall value. Aside from
the cost to build or lease a secondary site to host these BCP exercises, the computer gear
June 2013
Executive White Paper > Hewlett-Packard

in these sites often sits idle or heavily underutilized as it is only used during BCP activities while consuming
operating expenses the rest of the time.

The shortcomings of BCP explain why enterprises are coming to the conclusion that uninterrupted applica-
tion availability with its automated application failover and failback is a better option than BCP. The ready
availability of cloud technologies means that almost any size enterprise can realistically implement and main-
tain this environment—potentially more affordably and easily than BCP. Yet to achieve this higher form of HA
for all of their applications requires they first put in place the right set of technologies.

The Six (6) Technologies Needed to Achieve a “Higher” Form of HA

There are six (6) specific technologies that enterprises need to put in place to achieve this “higher” form of
HA for the applications in their environment.

1. Hypervisor clustering. HA all starts with virtualization as it is needed to facilitate non-disruptive

failover and failback of all applications. Using VMware vSphere with its vMotion and Metro Storage
Cluster (MSC) capabilities, organizations can transparently failover and failback virtual machines
(VMs) and their applications between different physical sites.

2. Array-based synchronous replication. VMware vMotion and MSC moves VMs back and forth
between different physical machines at different sites. However the data of these VMs must be
moved separately. To ensure the data is at the target site as a VM comes up requires the use of
array-based synchronous replication software such as HP 3PAR Remote Copy which keeps the
data associated with the VMs in sync between the two sites.

3. ALUA. Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) is used by hypervisors such as VMware vSphere
to communicate with backend storage arrays. ALUA provides multi-pathing (two or more storage
networking paths) to the same LUN on a storage array and marks one path “Active” and the
other “Passive.” The status of the paths may be changed either manually by the user or program-
matically by the array.

4. “ALUA” aware storage arrays. Should the status of paths be reversed (“Active” paths become
“Passive” and vice-versa), the storage array must notify the hypervisor host appropriately so that
the hypervisor can re-scan the network for currently active paths.

5. “Active-Active” controllers on storage array. Active-Active controllers such as are found on an

HP 3PAR StoreServ makes all LUNs “Active” on all controllers of the array. Its mesh active controller
architecture negates ALUA’s initial use case (managing “Active” and “Passive” paths to a single
storage array) freeing ALUA to be used for other purposes.

6. Quorum Witness. A Quorum Witness is software that resides on either a physical or virtual
machine and monitors the availability of each site. Should one site go down or offline, it detects
the status of the failed site, notifies both VMware and the HP 3PAR StoreServ array of this
condition and has both of them failover application operations to the alternate site.

HP 3PAR StoreServ Peer Persistence Delivers “Higher” Form of HA

for VMware vSphere Clusters
The value of HP 3PAR StoreServ’s mesh active controller architecture and its ALUA support come into focus
as enterprises look to deliver a “higher” form of HA. Since the HP 3PAR StoreServ does not need ALUA to
identify the best or “active” path to the backend LUNs on a single array as all of an HP 3PAR StoreServ LUNs
are “Active” on all of controllers, HP 3PAR StoreServ repurposes ALUA to deliver a “higher” form of HA.

Two HP 3PAR StoreServ storage arrays that span two locations are presented to a VMware vSphere Metro
Storage Cluster (MSC) as a single stretched cluster using its Peer Persistence Software. The HP 3PAR
StoreServ arrays use Remote Copy to synchronously replicate data to keep all of the data on the LUNs
presented to the VMs in the vSphere MSC in sync with one another.

2 June 2013
 Since HP 3PAR StoreServ controllers are Active-Active, the vSphere cluster at the primary production does
not need to dedicate ALUA to doing path management at the primary site. Rather the vSphere MSC uses
ALUA at the secondary site and marks its path to the HP 3PAR StoreServ array at this location as “Passive.”

Now the HP 3PAR Peer Persistence software plays its part. The HP 3PAR Peer Persistence software and
vSphere work together to detect any path failures for any VM. Should vSphere detect a path failure at the
primary site, vSphere will activate the “Passive” path at the secondary site and may vMotion the VM to a
physical server at the secondary site.

vSphere will at the same time generate an alert that the path at the secondary site is “Active.” A storage
administrator may then leverage the HP 3PAR StoreServ Peer Persistence software to issue a switchover
command to change the status of the “Passive” path at the failover site to “Active” and downgrade the
“Active” path at the primary site to “Passive.”

This switchover may be done manually at a

later time to preserve the integrity of the data
of this VM and others. Once the switchover is
done, HP 3PAR StoreServ arrays automati-
cally reverse the direction of replication.
Regardless if this switchover occurs, applica-
tion processing for the moved VM continues
uninterrupted.

The final piece of this HA puzzle is the Quorum

Witness. Should a complete array or site
outage occur at the primary site two sets of
activities are triggered. On the vSphere MSC
side, should only the array fail, it continues
processing on the physical servers at the
primary site. Only now it redirects all traffic
through the “Passive” path (which is now
made “Active”) at the secondary site. Should a
full site outage occur, vSphere will automati- Source: HP
cally start its cluster at the secondary site.

On the array side, the Quorum Witness detects the failure and notifies the HP 3PAR Peer Persistence soft-
ware to mark all paths at the recovery site as “Active” so regardless of what action VMware MSC takes (path
redirect or complete failover of all VMs) application processing may continue uninterrupted. The Quorum
Witness triggers this recovery without any manual intervention to ensure continuous application availability
with no VM restarts.

Load Balancing Comes Along for the Ride

This ability to non-disruptively failover and failback VMs between sites is already powerful. Load balancing
just adds to its appeal as it addresses two of the major drawbacks of both BCP and HA: the expense and
waste associated with creating recovery sites.

Unlike in the past when enterprises built or leased recovery sites and then saw these resources either sit
idle or go largely unused, they can now unlock their value in a number of ways. Minimally they can create
private clouds with production VMs hosted at both the primary and secondary sites. In this way all resources
are used and should perform better while still giving them the flexibility to automatically fail all of the VMs to
the other site should some type of disaster occur.

The other intriguing possibility is that enterprises may even have the option to lease server and storage
capacity from a cloud provider. Three out of four of the world’s largest service providers already use HP 3PAR
StoreServ as their storage solution. By selecting one of these providers as their cloud partner, enterprises

Executive White Paper—Hewlett-Packard 3

Executive White Paper > Hewlett-Packard
About DCIG
DCIG analyzes software, hardware and
services companies within
the storage and ESI industries.
can create a secondary site without having to physically build a second site. Further, HP 3PAR DCIG distributes industry, company and
product analysis by way of
StoreServ also offers multi-tenant capabilities so enterprises have access to these same load balanc-
Buyer’s Guides, viral marketing
ing features as if they had acquired and deployed an HP 3PAR StoreServ in their own data center. and community building using the
burgeoning blog infrastructures
The Icing on the Cake created worldwide.
Normally this is where enterprises start to get nervous. They understand the features. They see the
potential. They are sold on the idea. Then they see the price tag and they realize it will never happen
in their lifetime.

The pricing on the HP 3PAR StoreServ is the

Only the HP 3PAR StoreServ icing on the cake as it makes HA more afford- About HP
able and accessible to enterprises than ever HP creates new possibilities for
offers all of the features on a
before. Starting as low as $40,000 for the HP technology to have a meaningful impact
storage array that are needed 3PAR StoreServ 7400, enterprises gain access on people, businesses, governments and
to deliver this higher form of to features that are now largely reserved for society. The world’s largest technology
storage arrays with high six if not seven figure company, HP brings together a portfolio
HA that enterprises now seek.”
price tags. that spans printing, personal computing,
—Jerome Wendt, DCIG Lead Analyst software, services and IT infrastructure
In HP 3PAR StoreServ, enterprises get support at the convergence of the cloud and
for ALUA. They get a mesh active controller connectivity, creating seamless, secure,
with support for up to eight (8) controllers for performance intensive environments. They have access context-aware experiences for a
to the HP 3PAR Peer Resistance and Remote Copy software so they can synchronously replicate connected world. More information
data and then implement uninterrupted VM failovers and failbacks without needing to implement a about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at
third party appliance or replication software. They also get intangibles like the industry’s best integra- http://www.hp.com.
tion with VMware vSphere and the flexibility to tap into HP’s extensive network of service providers
to use to create a secondary site.

Bottom line: Some midrange storage arrays offer some of these features found on the HP 3PAR
StoreServ. Only HP 3PAR StoreServ offers all of the features on a storage array that are needed to
deliver this higher form of HA that enterprises now seek.

The HP 3PAR StoreServ: The Best Storage Solution for Achieving

a Higher Form of VMware vSphere HA
BCP is good but as enterprises are finding out, delivering on it is still labor and time intensive, comes
with recovery risks and does not eliminate unwanted costs and downtime. In its place, they see the
value that uptime and load balancing offer. However, until now they have been hard pressed to deliver
these services at any level much less achieve forms of HA and load balancing that spans data centers
or even extends into the cloud.

Using the HP 3PAR StoreServ and its Peer Persistence feature in conjunction with VMware vSphere,
enterprises can now do what has been largely impossible. It puts these higher forms HA and load
balancing within reach for VMware vSphere-hosted apps that other storage solutions at the mid-tier
level simply cannot match.

1. AT&T. 2012 AT&T Business Continuity Study. Rep. AT&T, May 2012. Web. 22 May 2013.
http://www.att.com/Common/about_us/pdf/national_business_continuity_summary_2012.pdf
2. Ibid.

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4AA4-6976ENW, Created June 2013