topic Re: Comman View EVA 9.1 in a Virtual Machine in Disk Enclosures

Comman View EVA 9.1 in a Virtual Machine

Christhian Chamba — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:56:46 GMT

Hi,

I have the following scenario:
* 1 Tape Blade SB1760c
* 1 EVA4400

In this Server I have Installed a Citrix XENSERVER 5.5, I created a Virtual Machine with Windows 2003. It Is Possible to install Command View EVA 9.1 in this VM???...

Greetings,
CCH

Re: Comman View EVA 9.1 in a Virtual Machine

Christhian Chamba — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:58:52 GMT

Sorry, the scenario is the following:
* 1 Blade BL465c G6
* 1 EVA4400

Any ideas???...

Re: Comman View EVA 9.1 in a Virtual Machine

Bill Costigan — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 02:24:56 GMT

CV must have access to LUN 0 on the EVA. With vmware this is only possible using iSCSI. If you have the iSCSI option on the EVA this may be possible with citrix. but I'm not sure. If Citrix can give you direct fiber channel access to the EVA it might also be possible without iSCSI. But I don't know the capabilities of XENSERVER. Sorry

Re: Comman View EVA 9.1 in a Virtual Machine

Patrick Terlisten — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 13:07:40 GMT

Hello,

AFAIK it's supported to install CV 9.2 into a VM and using NPIV to access the LUN0 of the EVA.

Re: Comman View EVA 9.1 in a Virtual Machine

Christhian Chamba — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:55:48 GMT

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for your help, What is NPIV and How configure NPIV in a Brocade SAN Switches with FW v6.3.0c.

Greeting,

Re: Comman View EVA 9.1 in a Virtual Machine

Uwe Zessin — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:58:07 GMT

The installation guide for CV-EVA V9.2 does indeed give some hints how to configure a VMware ESX guest VM.

It does not use NPIV - remember that NPIV *does not* give a VM a Fibre Channel adapter!

In the VMware vSphere Client you need to add a "SCSI device" and map it to an address, e.g. 0:1.

Re: Comman View EVA 9.1 in a Virtual Machine

Christhian Chamba — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 18:09:13 GMT

Hi UWE,

I don't use a VMware, actually I have a Blade with Citrix XENSERVER 5.5.

Any ideas???...

Re: Comman View EVA 9.1 in a Virtual Machine

Uwe Zessin — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 18:20:26 GMT

Yes, I understood. The question is whether you can map specific SAN SCSI LUNs to a VM's SCSI adapter. Unfortunately I don't know if you can do that with XEN.

> What is NPIV and How configure NPIV in a Brocade SAN Switches with FW v6.3.0c.

I did not see that question when I posted by previous response.

NPIV is short for "N_Port ID Virtualization". Normally a Fibre Channel port has one 64-bit World Wide Port Name (WWPN), uses it to login to a Fibre Channel switch and obtain one 24-bit Fibre Channel address (N_Port ID, FCID, PID, ... - the industry has given a number of names to it).

NPIV allows a port to present itself with multiply "identities" using multiple WWPNs and N_Port IDs.
One of its purposes it to give such an "identity" to a Virtual Machine so that its I/Os can be identified and managed using SAN tools.

Re: Comman View EVA 9.1 in a Virtual Machine

Christhian Chamba — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 19:23:20 GMT

Hi UWE,

I think I can create a SCSI vdisk and mapping to a EVA LUN, do you think that the CVEVA 9.2 will work???...

In this case it is possible that NPIV will work???...

Greetings,

Re: Comman View EVA 9.1 in a Virtual Machine

Torsten. — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 09:11:26 GMT

Consider this:

Your EVA has a problem and your virtual machines can no longer run. You won't be able to use command view - bad situation, isn't it?

Re: Comman View EVA 9.1 in a Virtual Machine

Uwe Zessin — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 10:46:29 GMT

Christhian,

I've looked a bit around and it looks like NPIV is part of the mechanism in XEN to map SAN LUNs to VMs. There are several articles on the WEB which decribe how to do it on a SUSE Linx, but I could not really find out if XENSERVER could do it.

Good point, Torsten. It certainly is unsupported and I would put the VM on local storage, but this little detail can easily forgotten.
It's been some years now that I told a customer how to save an EVAs configuration and I explained that he must store it on separate media (and why he should not store it on the EVA).

Some weeks later I gave them another visit and: guess what? He prodly explained to me that, yes, he had saved the EVA configuration [good, one point] and stored it on the 'central file share'.
Guess where this share ends up? [that makes another minus 2 points]

Re: Comman View EVA 9.1 in a Virtual Machine

Christhian Chamba — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:49:30 GMT

Hi Torsten / Uwe,

I have clear this problem and the client too, but now impossible to buy another server for lack of money.

The idea is to manage the HP EVA through a virtual machine and a couple of months to make the purchase from another server and install the CV.

My question is basically how I should configure the CV or the VM to be temporarily installed the CV in an Citrix XenServer Virtual Machine.

Re: Comman View EVA 9.1 in a Virtual Machine

gregersenj — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:49:39 GMT

It's an 4400. It got the CV ABM.
Meaning you've got command view on the management module.

There's some issues though.
It's very slow.
You can't upgrade HDD FW.
Phone home might still not work = no monitoring.

But I agree with Torsten.

BR
/jag