san admin policy

[Stanimir Hadjinikolov]

Hi All!

Please share with me your experience with
SAN administration. Is it possible to create
special user for SAN administration only /non-root/ in order all SAN-admin tasks to be provided. This user could execute all needed SAN-commands without other root activities.

Any experience/ideas?

[Torsten.]

What is your understanding of "SAN administration" ?

[Stanimir Hadjinikolov]

I understand all tasks, related to storage-providing to host: powerpath commands, ioscan, and so on...

[Torsten.]

You need to be root to run ioscan and most of the other utilities. So if you don't want that user to be root (this makes life much harder) you should setup sudo for several commands.

[Rita C Workman · Accepted solution]

OK you said powerpath, so I'll figure you have EMC hardware.
BUT....you do not mention your SAN environment - is it Brocade or Cisco (or something else)?

SAN Administrators would require root access or sudo privileges to run commands to provide needed information, such as WWN names on hosts (all platforms). If they don't have that, then they need to inquire of someone who does to provide the information.
SAN Administrators should know how to Zone hardware to fabrics, Map disks to the FA's, Mask luns to the hosts. If their SAN environment has a GUI interface they should be able to use these tools properly - as well as - be proficient at the command line level to run these same commands.
They should be knowledgeable of the switches or directors under their care and be able to access these devices to gather information, resolve issues and/or assist in researching resolving issues with Support, as well as know how to upgrade firmware, etc.
They should be able to maintain documentation on their disk environment and provide disk storage reports.
They should be able to provide reports for disk utilization projections and future needs.

I've probably left out something, but this should give you some idea. Basically the SAN Admin runs the SAN. They may not have designed or built the SAN, but they should understand it, have it well documents, and maintain it going forward.

Regards,
Rita

[Stanimir Hadjinikolov]

nnn