A question on FC Zoning

DevilWAH

Hi, Not a SAN engineer so do bear with me.

Suppose I have 3 ESXi server and a netapp filer with two heads that I want to run FC for data stores and each server and netapp head has 2 HBA's

So how should i zone up (performance and redundancy rather than security focus)

Put all 6 EXIi HBA's and all 4 NETapp HBA's in to a single zone ?

Put All 6 ESXi HBA's in to one group, create 2 groups for the netapp (each head seperate) and create 2 zones one for each head.

OR create 3 groups one for each ESXi server and create 6 Zones, with each ESXi hosts paired with each of the Filer heads?

OR create a separate zone for each Target and Initiator HBA so 24 in total?

Cheers

blargoe

DevilWAH wrote: »

OR create a separate zone for each Target and Initiator HBA so 24 in total?

This is the way it is typically done.

slinuxuzer

You probably want to enable ALUA on the luns, this will allow you to see "non-optimized" paths for the storage. Meaning a lun on head A can be accessed through ports on head B, if all the paths to head A are dropped. This is called "non-optimized" because the I/Os will traverse the interconnect. In the 2000 series Netapps the interconnect is "virtual" meaning there is no actual cable.