To use the SAN Volume Controller,
you must meet the minimum hardware and software requirements and ensure
that other operating environment criteria are met.
Minimum
requirements
You must set up your SAN Volume Controller operating
environment according to the following requirements:
- Minimum of one pair of SAN Volume Controller nodes
- Minimum of two uninterruptible
power supply units
- One IBM® System Storage® Productivity Center or
one master console per
SAN installation for configuration
SAN Volume Controller 2145-CF8 node
features
The
SAN Volume Controller 2145-CF8 node
has the following features:
- A 19-inch rack-mounted enclosure
- One 4-port 8 Gbps fibre-channel adapter
- 24 GB memory
- One quad-core processor
- Dual, redundant power supplies
- Supports up to four optional solid-state drives (SSDs)
SAN Volume Controller 2145-8A4 node
features
The
SAN Volume Controller 2145-8A4 node
has the following features:
- A 19-inch rack-mounted enclosure
- One 4-port 4 Gbps fibre-channel adapter
- 8 GB cache memory
- One dual-core processor
Solid-state drive (SSD) features
Support
for
solid-state drives (SSDs) is
an optional feature of the
SAN Volume Controller 2145-CF8.
SSDs include the following features:
- Up to four SSDs can
be installed on each SAN Volume Controller 2145-CF8 node.
An IBM PCIe SAS host bus adapter
(HBA) is required on each node that contains an SSD.
- Each SSD is
a 2.5-inch Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drive.
- Each SSD provides
up to 146 GB of real capacity.
- SSDs are
hot-pluggable and hot-swappable.
Supported hosts
In a SAN environment, host systems are application
servers that access data from the storage controllers that are connected
to the SAN. Hosts that are running in a number of operating environments
can connect to the storage using the SAN Volume Controller. Host connections to the SAN Volume Controller are
either SCSI over the fibre-channel SAN or iSCSI over an Ethernet
network.
For a list of the supported host
operating systems, go to the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller Web
site:
www.ibm.com/servers/storage/software/virtualization/svc
From
the Web site, take the following steps:
- In the Learn more column, click Interoperability.
- Click Recommended software levels for your SAN Volume Controller code
version.
- Click Multipathing / Host Drivers, Clustering and SAN
Boot Support - By Host Operating System to view a list
of supported operating systems and to access host attachment scripts.
Multipathing software
For the most current information, go to the
following Web site:
www.ibm.com/servers/storage/software/virtualization/svc
From
the Web site, take the following steps:- In the Learn more column, click Interoperability.
- Click Recommended software levels for your SAN Volume Controller code
version.
- Click Multipathing / Host Drivers, Clustering and SAN
Boot Support - By Host Operating System to view a list
of supported operating systems and to access multipath drivers. You
can also view Multipath Driver Co-existence with SDD information.
User interfaces
The SAN Volume Controller software
provides the following user interfaces:
- The SAN Volume Controller Console,
a Web-accessible graphical user interface (GUI) that supports flexible
and rapid access to storage management information
- A command-line interface (CLI) that uses Secure Shell (SSH)
Application programming interfaces
The SAN Volume Controller software
provides an application programming interface called the Common Information
Model (CIM) agent, which supports the Storage Management Initiative
Specification (SMI-S) of the Storage Network Industry Association.