MSA1500CS HA Kit configuration Questions.

[Louis Harle]

Am looking for some basic information regarding what security zoning actually offers as opposed to selective storage presentation, standard methodologies for configuration of an MSA1500CS with HA and anything else useful someone could throw my way. Not looking for someone to write a book, just a pointer at some good literature or a few tidbits here and there. Here is how I've currently configured it and it appears to be working but i don't see the benefit of Zoning yet....

fiber connection from each controller on MSA to each switch. Dual HBA in each server, fiber connection from each HBA to each switch. alias configured for MSA and servers, zones created for MSA/Server relationship, configuration saved/enabled. San partitioned into various arrays with hot spares and room for growth. Selective Storage presentation configured for each server.

Thank you in advance!

Lou

[Uwe Zessin]

FC switch zoning and selective storage presentation (SSP / LUN masking) are not rivaling technologies.

Zoning is used to isolate ports (e.g. of multiple servers) from each other. If multiple servers need to access one storage array, SSP is used to grant servers access to storage ressources (logical disks, virtual disks, LUNs - whatever terminology your vendor uses...).

It sounds like you have created individual zones from each server to the MSA. That is the way how it is suggested in HP's SAN Design Guide:
http://www.hp.com/go/sandesign

[James Muell]

SSP is significant in the HP MSA environment in that if SSP is enabled, the controllers know who owns each lun. If its not enabled all luns are accessible - rightly or wrongly by all connected servers.

Switch zoning is important - though not as much these days, to prevent SCSI bus resets from being broadcast by one device to all other devices in the SAN and possibly causing other systems to crash or have data corruption.
The principle of 'single initator zoning' is used to prevent this and isolates end point devices into separate zones. Ex. alias_hostA_hba0 and Alias_msacontrlr1 are in the only devices in the zone ZN_hostA_hba0. This is done for each half of the SAN fabric.

Your explanation of your setup is the same method we use for MSA configurations.