MSA1500, forgot to do SSP

[Pau Garcia i Quiles]

(Beware: I'm only a bit ahead a complete newbie when talking about SANs; I have read a lot but some details are still not clear to me)

I have three DL360 and a MSA1500cs with a 8-port switch. Each of the three servers has a QLogic HBA. There is no zoning.

Two DL360 (servers C1 and C2) run Windows 2003 Enterprise with cluster (for Navision) and the other DL360 (server A) is running Windows 2003 Standard and is out of the cluster.

I have 4 LUNs in the storage and each one has one and only one NTFS volume. Two of the volumes (U: and V:) are mounted on server A, and the other two (Q: and R:) are mounted on C1 and C2 (only one of the two servers is able to see the contents of the volumes because of MSCS, that's the way it should be).

The problem is I forgot to enable LUN masking when I created the LUNs, so when I reboot any of the servers (A, C1 or C2), Windows runs chkdsk for the four volumes because every server is viewing every LUN and data (Windows permissions, actually) gets corrupted.

This may be a very easy question, but I'm not sure of the answer, so I'm asking here: is it safe to enable SSP now? (servers are in production) Do I need to unmount the volumes? Or should I delete the volumes in the LUNs before I enable SSP?

The SSP configuration I'm thinking is:
- allow server A to see the LUNs for U: and V
- allow servers C1 and C2 to see the LUNs for Q: and R:

(I think SSP, not zoning, is the way to go here, but correct me if I'm wrong)

Thank you.

[Steven Clementi · Accepted solution]

You do not need to delete the logical units. The easiest thing to do is to take server A offline, just in case, but I do not think you will have any problems with it if you left it online.

At the very least, you will see an "Unsafe removal of Device" message once you implement the SSP. The settings you stated are the correct settings.

A reboot is not required after you set the SSP, but I would do it anyway.

Zoning does not buy you anything except for the segregation of traffic, which you should do anyway. SSP is LUN masking, allowing only certain servers to see specific storage. usually, but SSP and zoning are configured, but not for the same reason. SSP for LUN Masking and zoning for Traffic Segregation.


Steven