Hyper-V 2016 CSV Cluster HPE MSA205x and Offhost Proxy anyone?

[grimson]

Hi!

I was wandering if anyone succeeded in the configuration of an Offhost proxy with an HPE MSA205x SAN?
I tried but due to time constraints it failed unfortunately on not selectable HW VSS providers. (I could with a registry change on the Veeam server but then the backups just failed).

The setup is:
Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V
3 node HPE DL380Gen10 -> HPE Smart Array P408e-p SR Gen10 direct SAS -> MSA 2052
LUN's from HPE MSA offered in CSV to all nodes

The Veeam server did have the Hyper-V role and also had direct access to all LUN's like the Hyper-V servers itself.

Hmm, while typing this post I reread some articles;

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public ... 22203en_us

Code: Select all

NOTE: 
This guide provides descriptions of hardware providers relative to multiple versions of released HPE MSA hardware and firmware. Please note that for VL100 and newer, VDS and linear storage are not supported.

Guess i found the answer, it looks like hardware VSS is 'deprecated' on the MSA.
I did post this anyhow because I might be wrong about this.

Thanks for reading!

[Mike Resseler]

Arian,

I might be wrong but the HPE MAS 1040/2040/2050 VSS provider for windows server x64 should be used with MSA 2052? (https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public ... 925c2e472c)

[grimson]

Mike,

Thanks for the reply.
As far as I know the MSA 2050 and MSA 2052 are the same but the MSA 2052 does include some extra licensing and 2 SSD's.
I think again I misread the notes ouch .

Difference between VSS and VDS
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/fil ... -provider/
HPE MSA VSS and/or VDS Hardware Provider are available for installation
HPE says: Please note that for VL100 and newer, VDS and linear storage are not supported.

So VSS is still very well alive, I misread VDS for the HPE Virtual Disk Pools (that's the successor to linear storage pools, infact the only disk pools supported on the MSA205x)

For now this whole MSA HW VSS idea is abandoned but still wandering of anyone got this in production.

[RGijsen]

Old topic but still I figured to reply; we have both MSA2042 and MSA2052, and both have given us nothing but issues while using VSS. For some reason either Veeam, or the MSA are extremely slow to pickup the created snapshot. The snapshots are created immediately when Veeam requests to create them, and they are actually usable from that time, but Veeam seems to be waiting for minutes sometimes to pick it up and continue. During that time, other VM's that are backed up in that same or another job, fail with VSS as the system is busy. They will then revert to on-host backup, which works fine. We tried lowering the concurrency to only one VM at a time, which made VSS work fine, but obviously way too slow. On-host with Hyper-V's own backup functionality is certainly WAY faster in our environment, at least for incrementals. They tend to be random IO anyway, and even if we have mostly SSD in our MSA's, the storage is the bottleneck there anyway. For the fulls (we still make fulls every week) working right from the storage would certainly improve performance given it's more sequential nature. But for now we'll certainly stick with on-host.
I actually requested a feature to have the fulls work with off-host, and the incrementals with on-host, but I've never heard from that anymore.