host zoning on EVA 8400 without CA

[johnCatBE]

Hello

I'd like to hear others views on zoning multiple hosts to an EVA8400 - without CA replication ie so that all eight ports are available - four per fabric in dual-fabric san.

Is it sensible to attempt to influence i/o activity by only allocating hosts to certain pairs of ports - or assign all hosts to all ports and let the EVA work it out.

on one fabric assuming 4 ports per fabric

eg
myhost1 evap1 evap2
myhost2 evap3 evap4

or simply
myhost1 evap1 evap2 evap3 evap4
myhost2 evap1 evap2 evap3 evap4

Good to hear others views on this - or a pointer to the HP recomendations.

thanks

[Amar_Joshi]

Your best bet is to assign all the 8 ports to all the hosts. This will benefit you in cases when congestion occurs on some ports due to high activity from other hosts or when a controller has problem and all the hosts fail to second controller. Also your redundancy level is higher with all the ports assigned to all the hosts.

[johnCatBE]

Thanks Armadeep

Are there any exceptions to this? i'm wondering whether this should apply to all hosts all types ? ie no need to treat IBM AIX differently, for example?

john