HP P4000 VSA Fails To Install On Hyper-V With ‘Unmounting the configuration drive…’ Error

The SAN I’m installing in the lab at work is a HP P4000 (Lefthand) virtual SAN appliance (VSA).  While the majority of the online conversation for the VSA centres on VMware, there is a supported Hyper-V VSA, and obviously that’s the one I want to use.

I set up the storage server, a HP DL370 G6 with lots of disk, and got W2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V up and running.  I didn’t go Windows 8 beta because I only want to run RTM software for the underlying bits of the lab that don’t get wiped/etc – more on that once the lab environment is built.

Then I ran the setup.exe for the VSA and that’s where I wasted many hours because it kept failing with this error:

Installation Failed.

Provider failure

While ‘Unmounting the configuration drive…’

A search found one result and the suggestions in that forum post were about as helpful as standing on one foot, bouncing counter-clockwise, touching the tip of my nose, and signing the national anthem backwards.

I decided to dig a little deeper and found that HVSA_Original.VHD was a compressed file.  Hmm … interesting!  I then did the following:

1. Uncompressed the HVSA_Original.VHD file and moved it to the folder where I’d create my VSA VM
2. Created a new VM for the VSA in Hyper-V Manager
3. Attached HVSA_Original.VHD to the new VSA VM
4. Attached another new fixed VHD to the VM’s SCSI controller
5. Powered up the VM … it appears to be based on CentOS
6. “Logged into” the VM and ran the setup wizard to set the hostname and IPv4 configuration
7. Set up the CMC to remotely configure and manage the VSA
8. Configured a P4000 cluster and provisioned a LUN
9. Bob’s your uncle!  I think I’ve never managed a P4000 before.  EVA was much easier but P4000 has more potential, hence the complexity I suppose.