Storage on a Windows VMWare server via C-Class Enclosure

[Acxiom Unix Team]

I wonder if anyone can offer any advice. We have an HP BL465 G1 blade in a HP C-Class Enclosure. We are running Windows VMWare (ESX 3.0) on this blade and trying to present some storage via the SAN to it and failing.

We have zoned it all up to our EMC Clariion storage array and can see that the Clariion see's the HBAs of the Blade and can see that the Blade see's the Clariion so that all appears to be working.

Yet, no LUN is seen by this server. Tried rebooting, tried re-scanning but nothing.

So i am wondering if anyone else has tried to present SAN storage to a windows vmware (Esx3.0) server on a c-class enclosure? And if so did it work or did you have to do anything to resolve the issue?

[IBaltay]

hi,
if you have HP c7000 blade system, then there are 3 different FC connections modules from there:
a) fabric switch
b) virtual connect
c) passthrough
can you check it pls?

[Acxiom Unix Team]

Hi. The configuration we have is this starting from the blade.

BL465 Blade in Bay7 of the enclosure,this is then connected internally to the Cisco 9124e Fabric switches that are in the Interconnect slots 3 and 4. We then have a fibre cable from these Interconnects to a Cisco 9216 Fabric Switch(Which is part of our normal SAN environment) and then the zoning to the storage arrays is done on here.

The 2 fabric switches are linked in Trunking Mode and the ports on both sides are in the same VLANS.

Hope that makes sense...

[IBaltay]

yes thats seems correct,
so if the zoning is correct, then maybe the only problem is that you
a) did not created the host group with the bl465 g1 hba wwns assignment
b) did not present/map the LUNs to it

[IBaltay]

one addititonal,
there are several options to present the LUNs to the ESX host.
a)The most supported is the option of presentation the "big" LUN from the storage and then the ESX host creates the disks (files on the ESX FS) to the VMachines
b)But also the direct LUN assignment to VMachines should be supported

[Acxiom Unix Team]

No longer at the company i was when i posted this question. So closing thread now.