VMWare Fiber Connection Best Practices

/ March 15th, 2010/ Posted in VMWare / No Comments »

Zoning

Best Practice fibre cabling would be like so:
A0, B1, A2, B3 are all plugged into Fabric_A
B0, A1, B2, A3 are all plugged into Fabric_B

First HBA from each host plugs into Fabric_A
Second HBA from each host plugs into Fabric_B

Zoning example for Host1 zone on Fabric_A:
Zone members = Host HBA, A0, B1, A2, B3

Zoning example for Host1 on Fabric_B
Zone members = Host HBA, B0, A1, B2, A3
Clariion Settings

There are also two parameters that you need to pay particular attention to when working with Clariion Storage Systems
– The Failover Mode and The ArrayCommPath settings.
These control the behavior of the Clariion when a ‘trespass’ occurs on the array.
Trespass basically means that the ownership of a LUN moves from one SP to the other.

From an ESX server perspective there are two setting for these values.

-For a non-failover environment, the settings are as follows:

Initiator Type: Clariion Open
Failover Mode: 0
Array Commpath: Disabled

-For a failover-enabled environment, the settings are as follows:

Initiator Type: Clariion Open
Failover Mode: 1
Array Commpath: Enabled

ESX

Ensure ALL ESX servers on the Clariion are using MRU policy – your paths should look similar to the example below:

# esxcfg-mpath -l

Disk vmhba2:0:0 /dev/sdc (10240MB) has 4 paths and policy of Most Recently Used
FC 3:11.0 210000e08b1c8e42<->500601683021b9df vmhba2:0:0


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