Best practice: Which switch ports to connect EVA to?

[Jeremy C]

Mostly thinking about protection against failure...is there any "best practice" for which ports to connect the EVA to (for a non-blade switch)? My guess is that you wouldn't want them to be on consecutive ports (i.e. 0 & 1) because the ports are grouped in fours, so you wouldn't want a group of 4 to go out and take all connections to the EVA out (on that fabric).

[J Peak · Accepted solution]

This will depend on the topology of your SAN switch.

IMO: Best configuration is what we're fortunate enough to employ now.

Two SAN switches maintaining their own fabrics.
1/2 of our EVA ports plug into each SAN switch.

Within those switches we use the storage blades ( fewer ports per port group hence less contention for storage bandwidth ) for our disk arrays.

We have 2 storage blades per switch. So with 4 storage blades total, each storage blade gets 2 of our EVA connections.

Within those storage blades each EVA connection is using a different port group.


To summarize:
Divide amongst switches where possible.
Divide amongst blades in switches where possible.
Use storage blades where possible.
Divide amongst port groups in blades ( or switches if using single unit switches ) where possible.

Hope this helps... these are the best practices we use.

[Niels Vejrup Pedersen]

Hello,

As stated above you should consider dividing among port groups on the fc switches.

Cabling the EVA depends on which EVA it is, and what software it's running. (older vcs 3 cabling is different than todays cabling)

Also if using CA the cabling would be different among fabrics.

Genereally when not using CA, the cabling is done with the even ports going to one fabric, and the uneven ports going to the second fabric.

FABRIC ONE
CTRL #1 FP1
CTRL #2 FP1
CTRL #1 FP3
CTRL #2 FP3

FABRIC TWO
CTRL #1 FP2
CTRL #2 FP2
CTRL #1 FP4
CTLR #2 FP4


Regards,

[Amar_Joshi]

Jeremy,

Though Brocade has no bad record about ASIC failure (which manages ports in group of 4) but to be on safer side you are always open to have the EVA connections (2 per switch) spread across different ASICs.

My 2 cents...

[sreekanthtm]

Hi,

Your guess is correct...
>> My guess is that you wouldn't want them to be on consecutive ports (i.e. 0 & 1).

Depends on your switch model (ASIC), means you can connect 4&5 ;)

Rgds,
sreekanth.

[Sivakumar MJ._1]

Jeremy, Just check the diagram..

[Jeremy C]

I think this has been well answered by all of the above. Thanks everyone.