San switch and MSA - Help adding new alias/zone and presnting volumes

[phil preece]

Please bare with me, SAN and fibre terminology is still very new to me...

I have a HP StorageWorks MSA 2012fc and two HP StorageWorks SAN fibre switches 4/8 which were introduced and setup by a third party who I no longer have contact with.

At the moment I have server servers which connect to both switches for fault tolerance purposes. Each server has its own volume/lun. I recently introduced a new Windows 2008 R2 server with the intention of giving it access to a new volume on the MSA. I have installed a fibre card and attached it to the san switches. Next I created a new volume on the MSA and enabled the MPIO feature on the server 2008 box. At this point I’m became a little lost and nervous as it looks like I need to make changes to my san switches config...

Using the http WebTools I was able to look at my current switch configuration. Under Zone Administration I can see the new server is showing on port 7. I assume I need to create an alias for the server rather than using WWN and mac addresses. Then create a new zone and add the alias and both MSA channels to that zone. Finally, I need to add the new zone to the fabrication and save the changes to the switches?

Please could some confirm these steps are correct. Also, how do I take a backup of my current switch config so I can roll back should I encounter any problems?

Any help or advise would be greatly appreciated

[Stephen Kebbell]

Hi,

looks good so far.
You create an alias (usually the server name) and add the WWPN of the Server's HBA to that alias.
Then you create a zone, containing the new alias, and the alias(es) of the MSA Port(s)
You then have to add that zone to your config.
Then save the zone config, and (most important) enable it.

After that you need to repeat the procedure on the second SAN switch (for the other HBA port). Then you should be able to "see" the server's WWNs on the storage system, and assign the new volume to the server.
To take a backup of your existing switch config you can use the configupload command (should also be available somewhere in Web-Tools) and upload it to an FTP server.
You could also open a telnet session and capture the output of the cfgshow command in a text file. You can't use this file directly to restore your zoning config, but at least you have everything listed in that text file.

Regards,
Stephen