Command view EVA 8.0 in a Win2003 Virtual Machine ??

[Joffre B]

Hello everybody
I need some advice

* I have a Blade Server BL460c with a QLogic QMH2462 HBA
* The blade has installed VM Ware ESX 3.5 and some Win2003 Vitual Machines
* I have an EVA4400 and Command View EVA8.0,
* I have also configured the zones in the blade SAN Switch

My question is: if anybody knows if it is possible to install Command View 8.0 in a Win 2003 Virtual Machine in order to manage the EVA4400?

Thanks to all

[Tom O'Toole]

doubt it... The VM won't be able to directly access the fibrechannel adapters... I think.

[skris]

I hope these blades are in the same IP subnet as your primary Management SMA. You can rather use the CV EVA Web interface (from SMA where CV is installed) and manage your EVA's (From the Vmware VM's).

Cheers!
Shiva

[Steven Clementi]

Installing Command View is certainly doable. Managing the EVA is a totally different story... ;o)

If you can find a way to give the VM direct access to the hba, then you should be good to go.

I thought I remember someone trying to do this and getting it working, but I don't remember when/where. I am going to play with it tomorrow as I have access to... a VMware server, a SAN and several EVA's.


Steven

[Joffre B]

Thanks Steven
Please let me know any clue, I will be working around this subject.

Joffre B.

[DragomirAtea]

Hi Joffre!

If youre FC-switches support NPIV, its doable...

You can map a NPIV to a VM, but you wont be able to do a vmotion though, the NPIV is mapped to the local fc-card in the esx


Regards
Dragomir

[Uwe Zessin]

> NPIV is mapped to the local fc-card in the esx

NPIV does not give an ESX VM full SAN connectivity. The disks are still mapped to an emulated parallel SCSI adapter in the VM.

VMware says:
""With NPIV, SAN administrators see the virtual machines and can identify their traffic and add a redundant layer of LUN masking and quality-of-service controls, but the virtual machines still are isolated as before and do not have any additional visibility into the SAN. They still do not see Fibre Channel HBAs and cannot see the Fibre Channel targets or scan for LUNs that are not explicitly assigned to them by the ESX Server administrator.""

[me:]
First, you must set up an RDM to a disk device for your VM - only then you can assign WWPNs to the VM.

Then you need NPIV-capable FC-Switches and FC adapters.

If you are using WWN-based zoning, the new WWPNs must be allowed access to the storage array. Then you must set up the LUN masking on the storage arrays with those WWPN. The storage ressource must be assigned to the same LUN address like the RDM to the VMkernel (at least the manual says it and I have not tried if it works with a different address).

> but you wont be able to do a vmotion though

VMware says:
""Utilizing NPIV, a WWN can be uniquely associated with a virtual machine, and it remains associated with that virtual machine even as the virtual machine is dynamically transferred, using VMotion, across physical ESX Server hosts in a virtualized environment.""

[IBaltay]

Hi,
I will add some notes to the discussion:
if it is the virtual connect fc connection,
then the virtual connect is managing the wwns from the host to the storage, (which allows you freely replace the blade server, it will get the same wwns then before).

[Uwe Zessin]

Dragomir was talking about the NPIV feature of VMware ESX Server - this has nothing to do with the C-class Virtual Connect module.

I cannot imagine how the VC module helps with the problem in this thread - running CV-EVA in a Virtual Machine to manage an EVA.

[IBaltay]

Ok,
there are the following conditions under which it should work:
a) VMWare NPIV integration into VMs (VMs getting their own virtual FC HBA with virtual WWN)

b) ESX capability to transparently pass through all paths to the EVA controller LUNs.

Otherwise it is unreliable, because CVE needs access to the controller LUNs that corresponds to the EVA master controllere