3PAR HP SA TRAINING:

VIRTUAL COPY

November 1, 2010

© Copyright 2010 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.

The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. HP Restricted
COURSE OBJECTIVES
– At the end of this presentation the student should be able to :
• Explain the benefits of Virtual Copy (VC)
• Create a Virtual Copy Volume
• Understand the “rules” around VC Relationships
• Use the InForm GUI to manage Virtual Copies

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3PAR VIRTUAL COPY
A snapshot of another Virtual Volume (a base volume or another Virtual
Copy) created using copy-on-write techniques available only with a 3PAR
Virtual Copy license.

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VIRTUAL COPY: PROTECT, RETAIN & SHARE
DATA AFFORDABLY
3PAR Virtual Copy
– Smart
• Promotable snapshots Base Volume 100s of Snaps…
• Individually deleteable snapshots
• Scheduled creation/deletion …but just
• Consistency groups one CoW
– Thin
• No reservations needed
• Non-duplicative snapshots
• Thin Provisioning aware
• Variable QoS
– Ready
• Instant readable or writeable snapshots
• Snapshots of snapshots Integration with
• Control given to end user for snapshot Oracle, SQL,
management Exchange, VMware
• Virtual Lock for retention of read-only snaps

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4
VIRTUAL COPY CHARACTERISTICS
– Records only the changes to the original volume
– Administrator can make hundreds of Virtual Copies of a Virtual Volume
assuming there is enough storage space
– Virtual Copy volumes use CPG space
– Using the InForm GUI to create Virtual Copies automatically enforces
“relationship” rules
– Snapshots can be promoted to any read-write parent within the same virtual
volume family tree providing greater flexibility to the user.

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VIRTUAL COPY LIMITS 2.3.1
Maximum number of virtual volumes (base and virtual copies) 8192

Maximum number of base virtual volumes 4096

Maximum number of snapshots per base virtual volume 2048
Maximum number of read-write copies per read-only copy 256

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DUAL SD SPACE – TPVV/BASE AND VC
Dual SD Space provides the following benefits,
– The base virtual volume and the virtual copies can be mapped to different
CPG’s. This means that they can have different quality of service
characteristics. For example, the base SD space can be derived from a
RAID 1 CPG and the virtual copy SD space from a RAID 5 CPG.
– The base SD space and the virtual copy SD space can grow independently
without impacting each other (each SD space has it’s own allocation
warning and limit).
– Dynamic optimization can tune the base SD space and the virtual copy SD
space independently.

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VIRTUAL COPY RELATIONSHIPS
– The following shows a complex relationship scenario

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VIRTUAL COPY – COPY-ON-WRITE FUNCTION
(DATA WRITTEN)
Snapshot Admin (SA) Space Timestamp 5/25/06 14:35

1. Pointer to data
2. P
Base Volume
3. P
4. P 1. A
2. B
New
3. C
Write Data
4. D’
D 4. D’
4. D Copy-on-write to SD 5. E
6. F

Snapshot Data (SD) Space – Stores 7. G

Original Base Volume changes

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INFORM GUI VIEW OF VIRTUAL COPIES
– The GUI gives a very easy to read graphical view of VCs:

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CREATING A VIRTUAL COPY USING THE GUI
Right Click and select “Create Virtual Copy”

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CREATING A VIRTUAL COPY USING THE GUI
Provide a name and hit “OK”

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THANK YOU