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Simplify IT Operations and Productivity with Hitachi Storage Connector for Cisco UCS Director v02.3.0

By Sean Siegmund posted 09-15-2020 07:02

  
As a long-time partner with Cisco, Hitachi has developed the Hitachi Storage Connector for Cisco UCS Director since August 2015. Long before the announcement of  Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure Cisco Validated Design, Hitachi has partnered with Cisco on a plethora of integrations in an effort to leverage tools administrators have come to trust from Cisco and Hitachi.
Cisco UCS Director is one such example. It is an excellent way of enabling system administrators to perform centeralized management, monitoring, and reporting of Cisco UCS domains. It allows you to create and configure Fabric Interconnects, Chassis, Blade Servers, I/O Modules, FEX, Network and Storage Connections, Pools, Policies, and Service Profiles while monitoring environmental data points, server availability, and service profile association. Cisco UCS Director orchestrates many of the UCS Manager tasks, allowing for management via a single location. Did you know that businesses experience 66% lower ongoing administrative and management costs with Cisco UCS Manager?
With all the properties to manage the unified network and Cisco UCS blade system, actions related to the storage are much simpler with the Hitachi Storage Connector for Cisco UCS Director. Basic storage provisioning of creating logical devices, Dynamic Pools & and Virtual Volumes as well as host groups and LUN path provisioning helps with standard storage-related tasks, but provisioning VMware datastores and managing local and remote replication allows IT departments to standardize on a management platform and efficiently operate administrative functions that simplify the management of the IT infrastructure.
The Hitachi Storage Connector supports the following Hitachi Storage systems and software within v02.3.0:
  • Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 5000
  • Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F350, VSP F370, VSP F400, VSP F600, VSP F700, VSP F800, VSP F900, VSP G130, VSP G150, VSP G200, VSP G350, VSP G370, VSP G400, VSP G600, VSP G700, VSP G800, VSP G900 and Unified variants
  • Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F1500, VSP G1000 and VSP G1500
  • Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP)
  • Hitachi Device Manager (Dependency on Storage firmware versions)
  • Hitachi Infrastructure Gateway Appliance v7.4.0
Virtualization Software versions are supported
  • VMware ESXi 6.5 or 6.7
Software Versions of UCS Director Supported
  • UCS Director 6.6.0.0, 6.7.0.0, 6.7.2.0, 6.7.3.0
For more information on Minimum Microcode requirements, please see the following Hitachi Storage Connector for Cisco UCS Director User guide.
The main components needed outside of Hitachi Storage and Cisco UCS are the Hitachi command devices, Cisco UCS Director, Hitachi Storage Connector plugin user, and Hitachi Infrastructure Gateway Appliance. The installation assumes you have already deployed the Cisco UCS Director and you have appropriate licenses from both Cisco and Hitachi, and that you have already configured command devices for your configuration. After deploying the Hitachi Infrastructure Gateway Appliance OVA, and adding the Hitachi Storage Connector plugin to Cisco UCS Director, pods are needed to maintain storage users and resources deployed to the pod. For each pod, there should be a storage user and an infrastructure gateway. If only one pod is deployed, up to 10 storage systems may be utilized. In scenarios with remote replication, you should deploy a Hitachi Infrastructure Gateway Appliance at both sites. The following workflow gives a simple deployment scenario of a single pod.

Once the deployment is complete, the following are the supported high-level features with the Hitachi Storage Connector for Cisco UCS Director:
  • Hardware summary
  • Port Monitoring
  • Parity group management
  • Logical Device management
  • Dynamic pool management
  • Journal Pool Management
  • Host group management
  • Local & Remote Replication Management
  • Replication Pairs management
  • Hitachi Thin Image snapshot management
  • Global-Active device (GAD Management)
  • Resource Group management
  • Reports & Actions
    • System summary
    • Allocation summary
Details of the specific functions within each of these features are covered in the User Guide available at:

With the Hitachi Storage Connector for Cisco UCS Director, you can now manage your infrastructure from a single point, saving time and effort from an administration standpoint and driving increased efficiency. Below we have created a simple demo of provisioning a new datastore to an ESXi cluster. We create a new Hitachi Dynamic Pool, Create an LDEV, add it to a host group, and provision the LUN to multiple Paths. Also, within this demo, you will see the Datastore to Host Topology feature which allows you to validate the logical setup and that all hosts have access to that LUN as expected.

For a brief overview of the Hitachi Storage connector for Cisco UCS Director 2.3.0 see the following video.

For more Information on UCS Director please see the following URL
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/ucs-director/index.html
If you have deployed any of Cisco Compute, Networking or Hitachi Storage, HCI, CI Solutions and would like to share your experiences, please join our community. We’d love to hear from you!

Sean Siegmund
Technical Advisor, Hitachi Vantara
sean.siegmund@hitachivantara.com


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05-04-2022 12:27

Informative