Learning 3PAR Part 1 Chunklets, Logical Disk, CPGs, and Virtual Volumes

5 Layers to the hosts

As with any array the path that data takes to get from our hosts to its final destination on disk is a complex one but
thankfully we dont have to worry about all of the bumps in the road along the way. That said its always nice to
understand the road as best we can in order to determine how best practices and configuration changes will apply to our
environment. With the 3PAR that path contains 5 essential layers; Virtual Volumes, Common Provisioning Groups,
Logical Disks, Chunklets, and Physical Disks.

We can somewhat see by the diagram the relationship between each layer but before taking a holistic view lets first
discuss each layer

Physical Disks
This is an easy one right? A physical disk is just that, a physical disk located inside of your 3PAR array, encompassing all
types of disk within the array.

Chunklets
The first thing a 3PAR does when it is discovering its storage is break down all of the capacity on your physical disks into
chunklets. Each chunklet is 1GB in size and occupies contiguous space on a physical disk. Chunklets are local to
that physical disk only and cannot span to others.

Logical Disks
Logical disks are essentially a grouping of chunklets which are arranged as rows of like RAID sets. LDs will ensure
that each chunklet which resides in a RAID set is physically located on different physical disks. We dont directly create
LDs on the 3PAR they are generated during the creation of a CPG (explained next), more-so, when a Virtual Volume is
created on a CPG. All of the metadata however, RAID type, allocation, growth of an LD is defined when creating the
CPG itself.

Common Provisioning Groups (CPG)

A CPG is simply a pool of Logical Disks that provide the means for a Virtual Volume (explained next) to consume
space. When we deploy a CPG we do not actually use any of the space in our pooled logical disks until a virtual volume
 is created meaning a 2TB CPG with no virtual volumes consumes no space at all. We can think of a CPG similar to that
of an EVAs disk group, but feeding on logical disks instead of physical disks.

Virtual Volumes -> VVOL=LUN

No, these arent the VVOLs your looking for this is simply a terminology that 3PAR uses to define the LUNs that are
presented to the hosts they are not the VVOLs which we have all seen come supported in vSphere 6. Either way a
Virtual Volume is a LUN that draws its capacity from a CPG one CPG can provide space to many virtual volumes. A
virtual volume is the LUN that is exported out to your ESXi hosts, and eventually hosts datastores. Just like most arrays
Virtual Volumes can be provisioned either thick or thin with a thin provisioned Virtual Volume only instructing its
associated CPG to draw space from the logical disks as space is needed. CPGs have the ability to create logical disks as
needed to handle the increased demand for capacity up until the user-defined size limit of the CPG is reached.

So working backwards we can come to somewhat of the following

A datastore is located on a Virtual Volume

A Virtual Volume draws its space from a Common Provisioning Group (CPG).
A Common Provisioning Group is any given number of Logical Disks joined together to form some sort of contiguous
space.
A Logical Disk is simply a collection of chunklets which are joined together in rows in order to produce a certain RAID
set (1,5,6,etc).
A Chunklet is a 1GB piece (chunk) of any given physical disk within the array. Its also a very funny word.
A physical disk iswell, a physical disk.
So there we have it it being the very very very basic understanding of some of the terminology within the HP
3PAR. Certainly we can dive deeper into some of these terms here and we will in later posts I mean, there are many
different types of Chunklets, some reserved, some spare, but we will save those and some other terms such as Adaptive
Optimization for another post (mainly because I have no idea quite yet