Cabling EVA8000/8100 for CA

[AWilliams_1]

I just noticed a comment in a thread implying that cabling the host ports in a CA environment is different to a non CA configuration. Can anyone elaborate what the difference is.
I normally cable the EVAs such that ports 1 and 3 of each controller go to one fabric and ports 2 and 4 to the other.
For the EVA5000 I do port 1 of each controller to Fabric A and port 2 to Fabric B.

[Steven Clementi · Accepted solution]

Allan:

There used to be some different cabling requirements/"best practices" for CA back in the day, but that has effectively been changed to be this simple...

Odd ports go to fabric 1
Even ports go to fabric 2

(on a 8x00.. FP1 and FP3 would be in fabric 1, and FP2 and FP4 would be in fabric 2)

so.. back in the day... we used to do:

FP1A and FP2B to fabric 1 (Port 1 on controller A and Port 2 on Controller B)
FP1B and FP2A to fabric 2 {Port 2 on Controller A and Port 1 on Controller B)

(on a 3000/5000 for instance)

So the way you are doing your cabling seems "right" at the moment.


Steven

[AWilliams_1]

Thanks Steven, I do remember reading a while back that there was a different way of cabling the 5000 when used for CA, but I had noticed that the HP engineers cabled it as odds and evens so I just followed suit and had not even thought about it until I saw an answer to another question that implied there was still a difference.

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello Allan,

a cross-cabling (C1 FP1 and C2 FP2 to fabric 1, and C2 FP2 and C2 FP1 to fabric 2) is only needed if you have an EVA with VCS 3.x. With VCS 4.x and XCS you need a straight-cabling. This is also done with CA. For example in a data migration enviroment (move data from a VCS 3.x EVA5000 to a EVA6400) you need a cross-cabling for the EVA5000 and a straigt-cabling for the EVA6400. This is supported, but only for a short period for data migration.

So in you case you cabling is fine.

Best regards,
Patrick

[Sivakumar MJ._1]

Allan,

Check the attachment.