Comman View EVA 9.1 in a Virtual Machine

[Christhian Chamba]

Hi,

I have the following scenario:
* 1 Tape Blade SB1760c
* 1 EVA4400

In this Server I have Installed a Citrix XENSERVER 5.5, I created a Virtual Machine with Windows 2003. It Is Possible to install Command View EVA 9.1 in this VM???...

Greetings,
CCH

[Christhian Chamba]

Sorry, the scenario is the following:
* 1 Blade BL465c G6
* 1 EVA4400

Any ideas???...

[Bill Costigan]

CV must have access to LUN 0 on the EVA. With vmware this is only possible using iSCSI. If you have the iSCSI option on the EVA this may be possible with citrix. but I'm not sure. If Citrix can give you direct fiber channel access to the EVA it might also be possible without iSCSI. But I don't know the capabilities of XENSERVER. Sorry

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello,

AFAIK it's supported to install CV 9.2 into a VM and using NPIV to access the LUN0 of the EVA.

[Christhian Chamba]

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for your help, What is NPIV and How configure NPIV in a Brocade SAN Switches with FW v6.3.0c.

Greeting,

[Uwe Zessin]

The installation guide for CV-EVA V9.2 does indeed give some hints how to configure a VMware ESX guest VM.

It does not use NPIV - remember that NPIV *does not* give a VM a Fibre Channel adapter!


In the VMware vSphere Client you need to add a "SCSI device" and map it to an address, e.g. 0:1.

[Christhian Chamba]

Hi UWE,

I don't use a VMware, actually I have a Blade with Citrix XENSERVER 5.5.

Any ideas???...

[Uwe Zessin]

Yes, I understood. The question is whether you can map specific SAN SCSI LUNs to a VM's SCSI adapter. Unfortunately I don't know if you can do that with XEN.


> What is NPIV and How configure NPIV in a Brocade SAN Switches with FW v6.3.0c.

I did not see that question when I posted by previous response.

NPIV is short for "N_Port ID Virtualization". Normally a Fibre Channel port has one 64-bit World Wide Port Name (WWPN), uses it to login to a Fibre Channel switch and obtain one 24-bit Fibre Channel address (N_Port ID, FCID, PID, ... - the industry has given a number of names to it).

NPIV allows a port to present itself with multiply "identities" using multiple WWPNs and N_Port IDs.
One of its purposes it to give such an "identity" to a Virtual Machine so that its I/Os can be identified and managed using SAN tools.

[Christhian Chamba]

Hi UWE,

I think I can create a SCSI vdisk and mapping to a EVA LUN, do you think that the CVEVA 9.2 will work???...

In this case it is possible that NPIV will work???...

Greetings,

[Torsten.]

Consider this:

Your EVA has a problem and your virtual machines can no longer run. You won't be able to use command view - bad situation, isn't it?

[Uwe Zessin]

Christhian,

I've looked a bit around and it looks like NPIV is part of the mechanism in XEN to map SAN LUNs to VMs. There are several articles on the WEB which decribe how to do it on a SUSE Linx, but I could not really find out if XENSERVER could do it.


Good point, Torsten. It certainly is unsupported and I would put the VM on local storage, but this little detail can easily forgotten.
It's been some years now that I told a customer how to save an EVAs configuration and I explained that he must store it on separate media (and why he should not store it on the EVA).

Some weeks later I gave them another visit and: guess what? He prodly explained to me that, yes, he had saved the EVA configuration [good, one point] and stored it on the 'central file share'.
Guess where this share ends up? [that makes another minus 2 points]

[Christhian Chamba]

Hi Torsten / Uwe,

I have clear this problem and the client too, but now impossible to buy another server for lack of money.

The idea is to manage the HP EVA through a virtual machine and a couple of months to make the purchase from another server and install the CV.

My question is basically how I should configure the CV or the VM to be temporarily installed the CV in an Citrix XenServer Virtual Machine.

[gregersenj]

It's an 4400. It got the CV ABM.
Meaning you've got command view on the management module.

There's some issues though.
It's very slow.
You can't upgrade HDD FW.
Phone home might still not work = no monitoring.

But I agree with Torsten.

BR
/jag