Two SAN storage devices on a single HBA

[Howard_24]

This may seem like a stupid question, but can I have two SAN storage devices, EVA and Fiber NetApps, connected or zoned into the same hba?

I don't usually do something like this, but we are moving data between the EVA and a NetApps box and once the data has moved we will disconnect and rezone with just the NetApps box. I have created seperate zones and we are running VMware ESX 3.0 so the multipathing is not an issue.

Thanks,

Howard

[Rob Leadbeater · Accepted solution]

Hi Howard,

This should be fine... In the past I've had HSG80 and EVA storage systems connected to the same systems without any problems.

I wouldn't expect the NetApps to be any different. Just make sure the NetApps and the EVA are in different zones, as you've already done.

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Rob

[Howard_24]

Thanks Rob,

Should there be anything to worry about in this configuration? I have set my LUN ID's so that they don't conflict, but is there anything else.

Howard

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi Howard,

The only thing I did wonder about is if you were booting your ESX servers from the SAN. That might create some problems, as I think ESX will try to boot off the first LUN it sees...

Cheers,

Rob

P.S. Remember to say thanks by assigning points !

[Howard_24]

Rob,

On these hosts we are booting from SAN. Presently they boot from the EVA and may stay that way, but as they need additional storage it will come from the new NetApps box.

What caused us concern is that two of the Blades (HS40) came up as L-Ports. Everything seems to be running okay with them, but I can't figure out way they didn't come up as F-Ports. At that time I removed the second storage mapping (NetApps) from the config, but now I don't think that was the issue because the ports are still L-Ports.

I have read that the qlogic hba may have to be set to point-to-point rather than the default.
Tonight we will be configuring the second fabric so hopefully we have time to reboot them.

Howard

[Uwe Zessin]

> I have set my LUN ID's so that they don't conflict,

Duplicate LUN addresses are not a problem. I do have a customer with two EVA 8000 and each has mapped a virtual disk to LUN address 1 which is accessible by 4 VMware ESX servers.

We're going to change this, because we will introduce CA (data replication) and remapping LUN addresses after a failover would complicate the process.