Fibre Channel Switch Zoning Issues

[mistersparky]

Good afternoon everyone!

I’ve got some oddities with the setup of our fibre channel switching. The setup is as follows:

Two duplicate racks, each with:

• c7000 Blade chassis
• 2 * VC FlexFabric modules
• Multiple BL460 G8s
• 2 HP Storageworks 8/20q Fibre Channel Switch
• EMC VNX 5300 SAN

The above is setup with fibre channel zoning between the HBA LOM/FLB on each V-Flex to one of the Storageworks switches to each of the SPs on the EMC.

In addition, we have cross connects between switches in the different racks, with TR mappings that allow blades in one rack to access storage in another, with separate TR mappings for each of the switch pairs.

Problems and issues with the above:

• In general, this seems somewhat convoluted. If a blade LOM fails or I purchase/replace any blades, I’ve got to mess around with removing and adding a whole bunch of fibre channel zoning settings.
• What’s more, I’ve had issues with the last batch of new blades. One blade is very randomly seeing only 3 out of the 4 paths to storage in the second rack, despite the settings being exactly duplicated from another blade. I’ve also had issues with settings apparently disappearing from some of the newer blades.

Some questions:

• Is it generally considered best practice to configure fibre channel zoning for the blades on a LOM/FLB level (i.e., for each blade), or could/should it be configured at the F-Flex level (i.e., for all blades in the chassis).
• Are there any limits for zoning or TR mappings on earlier HP storageworks switches? Could it be that adding extra zoning or TR mappings is replacing existing entries?
• Are there any other things to be wary of with setups above, that could be causing some of the issues I described?

Thanks in advanced for any help with the above!