Blade Fiber Channel Mezz card connection with Virtual Connect

[Steve Whitmore]

When you only  have 1 dual port FC Mezzanine card in a blade, how many SAN fabrics can you connect to?  Just 2, or does Virtual Connect work its magic and allow more?  We are installing a new 3PAR system that will be adding storage to what is provided to our C7000 blade enclosure by an EVA, but all our blades only have the one FC mezz card and both ports are already used for the existing EVA to give path redundancy.  We can create a new SAN fabric for the 3PAR and use it to update the server profiles in Virtual Connect, but when applied, the new paths show as "not mapped".  We need the blades to have access to both the EVA and the 3PAR.  We are migrating all our virtual desktops to the 3PAR from the EVA.  Short of buying a second FC mezz card for each blade, any ideas how to make this work?  Thanks for any help.

[LouisH]

Hi!

Only way I know of to connect to two Storage Arrays through a single HBA is by SAN zoning. If you already have a pair of SAN fabric Switches for path A & B, just create new zones for new storage. New storage would have to be set up to recognize HBA's WWN. I don't know about 3Par, but HP EVA and EMC best practice is to zone 1 target and 1 host (initator), but nothing that I know of says that same host could not target a second storage array by using a new different zone. It would be up to the host (s) to see storage LUN's correctly. Present a new LUN, then scan on each host for new storage, continuing until all new LUN's are presented. This way you are guaranteed each host sees the same LUN in same order. You will have to check on using native OS mulitpathing for all LUN's.

Louis

[Casper42]

I agree with LouisH

You only have 2 ports. VC doesn't do any magic there to create more.
But those 2 ports can connect to almost as many arrays as you want as long as all those arrays (and the VC FC modules) are connected to the same SAN Fabric.