New install using old equipment

[Bullfoot]

our company just purchased another company and I am planning on using some of their hardward. I have 4 DL380 G6 servers 1 2012fc MSA and a Storageworks 4/16 SAN switch. I would like to use 2 servers for VM servers and 2 servers for VM workstations connecting each to the SAN. I'm looking for the best way to configure the switch and the SAN. The San has 2 controllers. Any information would be helpful.

[Johan Guldmyr]

If you only have one SAN switch you could set up virtual fabrics and split the switch in two to get some fault isolation.
Or you could just use the one switch and connect one cable from each controller and host to that switch. Then in the future if you do get a second switch you could easily create a second fabric for redundancy. In the switch set up zoning so you have one hba port and one msa port in each zone (one initiator one target).

[Bullfoot]

I'm not seeing the SAN at all from VM. I have a vdisk created but I don't see it. If I understand you correctly I should have 1 cable from the server and 1 cable from each controller on the SAN, is that correct? Does the SAN need to be set to loop or direct? I've looked at HP's docs and I haven't figured them out so any help is appreciated.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hi, 

one thing first: SAN is Storage Area Network. That would be the switch and HBA and cables and such.

The MSA2012fc is a device connected to the SAN.

You should probably set the host port in the MSA to direct or at least not the loop option.

You can connect the cables pretty much any way you want, what you could think about is if you want fault isolation or redundancy.

After you have connected the MSA to the SAN then you need to check if the ports come online. You can do that by typing "switchshow" in the CLI and looking at the ouput for the port where the MSA is connected. 

You may need to configure zoning on the SAN switch.

After you create a vdisk you need to create a volume and you need to map it to a server.

If your virtual machine don't see it perhaps your hypervisor don't do fibre channel pass through or has virtual HBA or something like that.

[Bullfoot]

Thanks for the help, I got 2 servers connected directly to the MSA and communicating. Looks like I have a problem with the switch.

[Greybeard]

Did you clear any old config on the switch? If it has some zones set it could be the reason not everything is seen.