Creating, attaching, and protecting volumes with high availability

Ops Center Administrator enables you to create, attach, and protect volumes in a single page.

Register Ops Center Protector in Ops Center Administrator.
Set up the environment for high availability.

Note: If you want to align the same volume ID between a primary volume with a secondary volume of a high availability pair, the secondary volume ID must belong to the metadevice or the same virtual storage machine as the primary storage system. If you want to use the same virtual storage machine, ensure it has the same resource group.

Click Servers on the dashboard to open the Servers page or navigate to the detail page for a server.
Select a Fibre or iSCSI server and then click Actions > Attach Volumes > Create, Attach and Protect Volumes with High Availability.
Configure volumes for the specified storage system.
You can switch to another storage system by using the Storage System list. To add the volume to a virtual storage machine, use the Virtual Storage Machine list. If you don't choose a VSM, the meta-resource group is used.
1. Select the number of volumes.
2. Enter the volume label and select a suffix for it.
3. Select the size.
4. Select the volume unit: GiB, TiB, or Blocks.
5. Select the pool type: Thin or Tiered.
6. For a Thin pool, select the tier: Diamond, Platinum, Gold, Silver, or Bronze.
  If the storage system has available capacity from external storage, you can also select the External tier.
7. (Optional) Select the pool from the list of available pools. The default selection is Auto Selected, which means that Ops Center Administrator selects the best pool for provisioning the volume based on utilization and tier requirements.
Optionally, select a type of Capacity Saving: Compression or Deduplication and Compression.

Note: You can set capacity saving for volumes based on tiered pools for VSP 5000 series and VSP G1x00, F1500 storage systems with microcode version 80-05-4x or later.

Note: If you choose Deduplication and Compression and later want to update the volume to Compression you must first disable Capacity Saving.
You can specify a Volume ID / Range in decimal or hexadecimal format.
(Optional) For a tiered pool, select the Tiering Policy from the list. Tiering policy choices available in the list depends on the choice of pool that was made in the previous step. Tiering policy choice is not available for auto-selected pools.
When you have made your choices, click the plus sign (+) to add the volume row to the list of volumes that are being created. Add more rows as needed.
Click Next to move to the Attach Settings window.
The Host Mode is set by default to the server operating system. You can make a selection if needed.
The server OS Type is provided when the server is added to Ops Center Administrator.
The prepopulated Host Mode Option depends on the Host Mode selection. The default Host Mode Option can be changed manually.
Default values are set only for VMWARE EX and WIN EX host modes. The default for all other Host Modes is none.

Ops Center Administrator identifies all host groups containing any of the server WWNs. If all of those host groups have the same host mode and host mode options, those settings are prepopulated with the same settings in the host groups.
Select Mandate LUN Alignment.
This option specifies whether to assign the same LUN number to multiple servers for volumes containing primary and secondary HA pairs. If Yes is specified, the same LUN number is always assigned to each primary and secondary HA pair volumes among all servers. If No is specified, Ops Center Administrator tries to use the same LUN if it is available. If it is not available, Ops Center Administrator selects available LUNs separately for each primary and secondary volume.
Note: If you specify the LUN range for volumes in the LUN Settings window, the LUNs of primary and secondary volumes may not be aligned even if Mandate LUN Alignment is set to Yes.
The Auto Create Zone is set to No by default. You can set it to Yes to automatically create zones.
Leave ALUA set to Enabled to set preferred paths.
You can confirm which Volume IDs will be used by clicking View Proposed Volume ID Selection.

Select Yes to mandate using the displayed volume IDs.
Note: The Mandate Using Displayed Volume ID selection will be reset to No if you revert to the previous step.
Click Next to proceed to the Select Secondary Servers (Optional) screen.
Optionally, select a secondary server, servers, or server group, then click Next to proceed to the Protect Settings screen.
Choose whether to use an existing replication group.
Select the Consistency setting. By default, this is set to Yes. Using consistency means that copy processes run on all pairs in the group simultaneously.
Select a replication group from the options in the Replication Group list or enter a new name. Up to 26 alphanumeric characters, hyphens (-), and underscores (_), are allowed. Spaces are not allowed. If you select an existing replication group, the Storage Pool of Secondary Storage System for S-Vol and Quorum Disk are selected automatically.
Note: Ops Center Administrator can protect volumes with high availability in an existing replication group with the following conditions:
- P-VOL STATUS and S-VOL STATUS of all paired volumes in the replication group is PAIR.
- Status of the corresponding replication in Ops Center Protector is OK.
Note: Capacity saving setting applied to the secondary volumes depends on the version of Ops Center Protector.
- v7.4 or earlier: The capacity saving setting of the secondary volumes will not be enabled.
- v7.5 or later: The same capacity saving setting as the selected volumes will be applied to the secondary volumes. However, it will not necessarily be applied in any of the following cases:
  - An existing replication group is selected and Match Origin Volumes is set as the capacity saving setting policy in the corresponding Data Flow in Ops Center Protector
    
    Ops Center Administrator will only set Match Source Volumes or None but Match Origin Volumes can be set in Ops Center Protector for cascading high availability pairs. Ops Center Administrator does not support that pair configuration.
  - The pool specified in Storage Pool of Secondary Storage System for S-Vol cannot be used to create volumes with capacity saving enabled.
Select the pool to use for S-Vols and select a quorum disk.
Click Next to configure the primary site.
In the Configure Primary Site window, connect ports in the primary storage system to the server in the primary site and to the server in the secondary site, if there is one. You can configure preferred and unpreferred paths.
You can view servers and their WWNs, along with ports on the storage system. Ops Center Administrator scans for existing host groups on the storage array and try to reuse them by default.
For VSP 5000 series storage systems, you can click a port to display a list of ports with their DKC locations, CTL locations, and redundancy levels.
The following options are available for managing LUN paths:
- If you connect more than one server to the same port, the Share a host group with all servers box displays. Select the box to add the servers to a single host group.
- Note: If host groups already exists on that port and single host group cannot be created, the check box will not appear.
  Existing paths are populated as follows: all existing host groups with one or more server WWN and the exact same host mode and host mode options selected on the Attach Settings window are populated as paths.
  To prevent the volume from being added to an existing path, click the path to highlight it, then click Delete Selected.
- Click Suggest to populate automatically selected paths. By default, the least-used ports are selected. Suggested paths need both the server and storage ports to be logged into fabric switches in the Ops Center Administrator inventory.
  Note: For VSP 5000 series storage systems, the first port suggested has the fewest LUN definitions and the second port suggested has the second fewest LUN definitions.
- To manually create a path, click a WWN and a port to connect them with a blue connector line. Click the connector again and then click Delete Selected to delete the connection.
- Optionally, you can click Switch View to use tables to create paths by selecting Server Ports to attach to Storage Ports.
Click Next to configure ports in the secondary storage system to the server in the primary site, and to the server is the secondary site, if there is one.
Click Next to continue to the optional Operation Plan step, you can confirm settings specified in each window and can confirm the resources to be used in the job, including LUN candidates.

Note: To view the plan summary page, limit the number of LUN Paths to 5000.
You can specify the LUN range for volumes in the LUN Settings pop up window which is launched by clicking LUN Settings button above the Planned Path Configuration table.

Note: If you specify the LUN range for volumes in the LUN Settings window, the LUNs of primary and secondary volumes may not be aligned even if Mandate LUN Alignment is set to Yes.
You can make it mandatory to use the LUNs displayed in the table by specifying Yes to Mandate Using Displayed LUN.
When you are satisfied with all the settings, click Submit.
Click Submit to create a job to create volumes, attach to servers and set up data protection.
You can monitor the job in the Jobs page.

Note: If the job does not complete successfully, access Ops Center Protector to remove the related resources (Block Host Node, Policy, and Data Flow) with the same name as the selected Replication Group.
When using an existing Replication group, remove added P-Vol from Block Host Node.

To edit a Block Host Node created by Ops Center Administrator in Ops Center Protector, specify LDEV IDs in decimal format per line and not in hex format or range format.