VC FlexFabric connecting multihoming SAN switches

[chuckk281]

Natesan had a customer question:

***************

We have customer with C7000 blade enclosure having interconnect module , Virtual Connect FlexFabric, connecting to 4Gb SAN switch connected with EVA storage, they wanted to connect the new 16GB SAN switch with same VC FlexFabric with another storage, is it possible have multihoming SAN connectivity  this combination?. Thanks for your reply in advance.

***********

Input from Kant:

*************

You can connect to multiple fabrics with VC FlexFabric. As documented in VC FC cookbook - http://h20628.www2.hp.com/km-ext/kmcsdirect/emr_na-c01702940-9.pdf, page 15.

*************

Reply from Dan:

************

To confirm this, I have personally connected a single FlexFabric module to 2 different Brocade SANs AND a 3PAR Direct Connect at the same time.  So effectively 3 SANs at once.

The only thing to keep in mind is each port on the FlexFabric CNA can only connect to 1 SAN at a time.

If you want redundancy, then each port is connected to the same SAN via different switches.

But for migrations and such, you can connect port 1b to the A side of one SAN and Port 2b to the B side of a different SAN.

In my case we had 3 ESXi hosts using Direct Connect to the 3PAR, 2 Blades going to the Customer’s Brocade SAN for their own testing, and 2 other blades setup on some new loaner Brocades being controlled by BNA/SPM/Matrix for a CSM demo.

************

Other comments?