Converged & Hyperconverged Infrastructure

In today’s fast-paced IT landscape, agility and reliability are critical, especially when it comes to enterprise applications like SAP HANA. Enterprises running SAP HANA in a Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) model demand flexibility, performance, and automation. With the Hitachi Vantara VSP One Block Storage modules for Red Hat Ansible, organizations can streamline their SAP HANA TDI storage provisioning process like never before.

In this post, we’ll explore how to automate SAP HANA TDI storage provisioning using Hitachi Vantara VSP One Block Storage and Hitachi Advanced Servers with Ansible to reduce manual effort, ensure compliance with SAP KPIs, and accelerate time-to-deploy.

The Value of SAP HANA TDI and Hitachi Vantara

SAP HANA TDI allows enterprises to design their infrastructure using certified components, including storage, rather than relying on pre-built appliances.

Hitachi Vantara provides a full-stack, SAP-certified solution:

• VSP One Block Storage: NVMe-powered, high-performance block storage with enterprise features like scalability, high-availability, high performance, snapshots, multipathing and many more.
• Hitachi Advanced Servers: SAP-certified x86 servers offering high performance, memory scalability, and reliability ideal for SAP HANA workloads.

  Benefits of This Stack:

• End-to-end certified infrastructure for SAP HANA
• Reduced risk of incompatibility
• Enterprise-grade performance and support
• Simplified automation using Ansible modules for Hitachi Infrastructure

The Role of Hitachi Vantara Storage

Hitachi Vantara VSP One Block Storage brings enterprise-grade performance, reliability, 100% data availability and scalability, SAN Storage provides:

• VSP One Block Storage Modules for Red Hat Ansible
• Low latency and high throughput block storage
• Seamless multipath redundancy
• Snapshots, replication, and other enterprise features
• Rich APIs for automation
• SAP HANA certified performance and reliability

These capabilities make Hitachi Vantara VSP One Block Storage an ideal fit for SAP HANA TDI environments.

Why Automate with Ansible?

Manual storage provisioning is slow, error-prone, and not scalable across environments. With Red Hat Ansible using VSP One Block Storage modules, you can:

• Automate SAN volume creation via Hitachi VSP REST APIs
• Configure VSP One Block Storage Ports
• Configure Port group and add WWNs
• Create Parity Groups with the required RAID
• Create Pool Volumes and Storage Pool
• Create Virtual Volumes for SAP HANA Server
• Map LUNs to SAP HANA hosts

All of this is achieved using reliable and repeatable Ansible playbooks, centrally managed from a dedicated Ansible control node.

Architecture Overview

Here’s a sample layout of what this deployment looks like:

•  Hitachi Vantara Advanced Servers as SAP HANA Hosts: RHEL 9.x or SLES 15 SPx certified for SAP HANA
•  Hitachi Vantara VSP One Block Storage: Providing block-level LUNs over Fibre Channel
•  Ansible Control Node: Running playbooks using Hitachi Vantara’s official Ansible modules
•  Hitachi UAI Gateway: Used by Ansible to communicate with the VSP One Block system (Not required if using Direct connection) 

With the architecture in place, let’s now look at how Hitachi’s Ansible Modules are used to automate the storage provisioning process.

Automating Hitachi VSP One Block Storage with Ansible

Hitachi Vantara provides official VSP One Block Storage Modules for Ansible to manage its storage systems. Below is a simplified example of how to use them in an SAP HANA TDI context.

Prerequisites:

Hardware requirements

•  VSP One Block 20
•  VSP One Block 24
•  VSP One Block 26
•  VSP One Block 28
•  VSP 5100, 5500, 5100H, 5500H, 5200, 5600, 5200H, 5600H (SAS)
•  VSP 5100, 5500, 5100H, 5500H, 5200, 5600, 5200H, 5600H (NVMe)
•  VSP E590, E790, E990, E1090,
•  VSP F350, F370, F700, F800, F900, F1000, F1500
•  VSP G350, G370, G700, G900, G1000, G1500

Software requirements

•  Red Hat Ansible Core - 2.16, 2.17, 2.18
•  Python - 3.9 or higher
•  Hitachi UAI Gateway 4.7 for using Gateway Connection (Not required for Direct Connection)

Supported operating systems for Control node

•  Oracle Enterprise Linux 8.9 or higher
•  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.9 or higher

Recommended Control Node configuration

•  CPU/vCPU - 2
•  Memory - 4 GB
•  Hard Disk - 30 GB

Installation of module on Ansible Control Node

ansible-galaxy collection install hitachivantara.vspone_block

Playbooks

A comprehensive automation pipeline available on official Hitachi Vantara’s GitHub and defined in the main.yml playbook has been developed to streamline the initial creation of SAP HANA scale-up volumes on Hitachi VSP One Block storage. The pipeline includes two dedicated workflows, each thoroughly tested to ensure reliability across all volume creation tasks.

•  sap-hana-tdi-su-single-pool: Designed for the latest VSP
•  sap-hana-tdi-su-two-pools: Designed for older VSP

The above pipelines efficiently orchestrates the following tasks:

1.  Configure Storage Port: Sets up the necessary storage ports on the Hitachi Vantara VSP Block Storage system using 1_storage_port_create.yml
2.  Configure Hostgroups: Establishes host groups and adds WWNs of hosts using 2_hostgroup_create.yml
3.  Parity Group Creation: Creates parity groups with the required RAID type for data redundancy with 4_paritygroup_create.yml, after retrieving the parity group ids with 3_paritygroup_get_pg_id.yml
4.  Single or Two Storage Pool with Pool volumes Creation: Create a storage pool with approx. 4 or 8 Pool Volumes (PVOLs) with 5_storagepool_create.yml
5.  Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) Creation and Mapping: Provisions for VVOLs are made for operating system and SAP HANA components, including shared, log, and data volumes, utilizing the 6_vvol_creation_in_pool.yml configuration file. These volumes are then mapped to the host groups that contain the host WWNs. The creation process adheres to Hitachi Vantara's best practices for SAP HANA, ensuring optimal performance and reliability.
6.  Variables: To manage configuration efficiently, the following two variables are used:

• •  vsp_direct_variables_create.yml: A file containing global variables for the storage provisioning process, there would be a separate file for modification and deletion.
  •  ansible_vault_storage_var.yml: An Ansible Vault file to securely store sensitive VSP credentials and connection information.

Run the ansible playbook command to use pipeline:

ansible-playbook main.yml -e "vsp_storage=e1090" --ask-vault-pass

Use the --extra-vars or -e EXTRA_VARS flag to pass the VSP model and --ask-vault-pass or -J to securely access credentials from the Ansible vault.

 Note: Always run the playbook with the -e or --extra-vars option to specify the VSP type for the pipeline. If the VSP type is not provided or is incorrect, the pipeline will fail or generate an error.

Key Benefits

•  Faster Deployments: Go from hours to minutes
•  Repeatable and Auditable: No manual steps or guesswork
•  Compliant: Aligned with SAP KPIs and Hitachi best practices
•  Scalable: From dev/test to full-scale production

Conclusion

By combining Hitachi Vantara VSP One Block and Red Hat Ansible, enterprises can take full control of their SAP HANA TDI deployments ensuring they’re fast, scalable, and future-proof. As infrastructure continues to evolve, automation is no longer optional, it’s the foundation of modern, efficient SAP landscapes.

To learn more or try the automation in your own environment, check out the official Hitachi GitHub repository or contact our team for a demo.

References

Ansible Galaxy

Ansible playbooks - Ansible Community Documentation

GitHub - hitachi-vantara/hv-playbooks-sap

GitHub - hitachi-vantara/vspone-block-ansible: Public repository for Hitachi Storage Modules for Red Hat® Ansible®