7200 FC Zoning Question

[JLester]

We are in the middle of a new install of a 7200. They have completed the initial setup and another team will be coming soon to do the configuration. They said I needed to have the zoning and hosts ready before the next team comes. Our current setup is two HP c7000 Bladesystems. One system has Brocade 4/16 switches and one has Brocade 8/16 switches. There is also an existing EVA4400 with the integrated FC switches. We have two fabrics: each has one of the switches from both c7000's and one of the EVA switches. Most of our production blades are in the c7000 with the older 4/16 switch. Our 7200 has 4 FC ports. I've connected one from each node to a free port on the 8/16 switches.

Should my performance be OK with this setup? Should I use the two other free ports on the 7200 to connect to the c7000 with the 4/16 switches? I am not real familiar with fibre-channel and was not sure if one device should show up multiple times in the same fabric. I know in Ethernet that would create problems, but I am not sure in FC.

Thanks,
Jason

[mugurs]

You won't have one device but 2 different devices, each of you 7200 ports being one different device in your SAN, so I think your configuration would be OK.

regards,
mugurs

[skumflum]

Why not connect 3PAR to the EVA embedded switches? They are basically normal 8G B-class (brocade) switches just integrated in the controllers. This would be the “normal” topology if they were standalone switches.

[JLester]

I actually talked to one of the engineers from HP yesterday that is coming to do the config. He sent me the Best Practices guide that cleared up lots of things for me. Here's what I ended up with:

FC Ports:
0:1:1 - Brocade 4/24 in c7000-1 (Fabric 1)
1:1:1 - Brocade 8/24 in c7000-2 (Fabric 1)
0:1:2 - Brocade 4/24 in c7000-1 (Fabric 2)
1:1:2 - brocade 8/24 in c7000-2 (Fabric 2)

That gives each of our blade servers (bl460g8's with 2-port HBAs) four different paths to the 7200, all with Active I/O.

Thanks,
Jason

[afidel]

That config should give each blade 2 paths to your storage, not 4 since each hba is only connected to one switch/fabric in the chassis.

[JLester]

Each of the HBA ports can see two paths to the 7200 since it has two ports connected to each fabric. When configuring the hosts on the 7200, it saw four paths to each.