SAN Connectivity

[vaseemuddin]

Whats the best practise for connecting a server with SAN hp eva 8000.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hi!
There is a document called hp san design reference guide. This has lots of best practices guides.
There's quite a few things to consider when connecting a server. Operating system stuff, drivers, hba, multipathing.
Is there something specific you are wondering about?

[vaseemuddin]

I have a server \\BL20P G3 with processor 2 x INTEL XEON 3.6GHZ and has Operating system 2003 ENT ED SP2 32 BI.

We have Hp EVA 8000, wanted to know the SAN drivers and best practise of connecting the server to SAN as this is my first time in connecting a server to SAN, basically iam into maintaince rather than allocation

[Johan Guldmyr]

Ah ok. What you do is:
A) you need to zone the blade to the eva. You may have san switches in the enclosure where you can do this.
B) before that you should install drivers and mpio dsm and manager on the server. You should update the os with patches as well.
C) after these you can present the vdisk to the server. Then a rescan should give you the new disk on the server.

As for best practices there are things like block size on the disk. Queue depth on the hba. There depend on the service you are going to run and you need to do a bit of testing to tune this right. Often though the defaults are ok.
Have the primary path for the server to the eva via the controller that owns the vdisk on the eva.

[vaseemuddin]

Thank you very much....i would be performing the activity tomarrow and will update you about the details

[Johan Guldmyr]

No problem good luck :-) if you have any questions tomorrow you can post in this thread i'll try to reply if i'm awake.

[vaseemuddin]

I have installed the mpio dsm drivers and have rebooted the server, logged back and no virtual disk is listed, i have unpresented and presented the disk back but still same issue, i have rescanned the disk but no go.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Good morning,
is the server zoned in with the EVA?

when you add the host in Command View - did the EVA find it automatically or did you add the wwn manually? When you added it, which OS type did you chose?

What kind of HBA do you have? For Qlogic there is the tool sansurfer and for emulex the hbanywhere. These you can use to troubleshoot more.

Did you install the hba drivers and MPIO manager as well?

[vaseemuddin]

Good Morning,
yes the server is zoned in EVA, earlier server was connected to HP EVA 8000 and we have formatted the server and need the SAN connectivity back.

I have installed the Mpio Dsm drivers but not the HBA drivers,let me search for the HBA drivers

[vaseemuddin]

from where should i install the HBA drivers for Qlogic

[Johan Guldmyr]

You can find them on hp.com

Which HBA do you have?

[vaseemuddin]

I have Qlogic, i have tryed installing the driver but says its already installed from Hp site

[Johan Guldmyr]

Maybe the qlogic sansurfer can give you some help, you can also find it from HP's site.

In windows device manager - do you see any HSV200 devices? Or unknown devices?

Have you tried to restart the blade?

[vaseemuddin]

I have checked the device manager but there are no san related devices or unknown devices.

i have restarted the server couple of times but still nogo

[Johan Guldmyr]

I don't see a fc adapter listed in that screenshot? When you boot the blade, do you see the fibre channel HBA in the POST?

You didn't answer my questions about the vdisk/presentation. Can the EVA see the server? Is the server logged on to the SAN-switch?

Neither the one about qlogic san surfer, do check them out.

[vaseemuddin]

I havent done any thing about vdisk presentation..as i told you i have formatted the server and have to put the connectivity back to SAN.

Iam not seeing the devices in device manager but i have tryed one step of unpresenting ant presenting the vdisk to the server but has no result

[Johan Guldmyr]

OK.

As I see you're new to the forum, don't forget to give points to posts.