VMWare ESX 4i

[Sean Ahearn]

We have a MSA2312FC Dual Controller SAN in our office. Right now we have 2 Windows 2008 64 Bit machines running off them. We would like to add 2 VMWare ESX 4i servers as well. Im pretty new to HP SANs. Is there any software I need to get the servers to see the SAN disk? Any tips or suggestions? It was fairly easy adding the windows servers.

[Mark Wibaux]

Firstly some assumptions
- you have dual fibre connections from your windows servers and will have them for the new esx hosts.
- you have SAN switches sitting between your MSA and the current windows servers.
- These switches have available ports and that zoning was configured on them.

First thing to do is to check how your LUN presentation is configured on the MSA. By default the MSA will allow all servers attached to the SAN to see all disks. If your system is configured this way you need to change this so that your current disks are only presented to the correct Windows hosts otherwise you will have your ESX servers and Windows servers trying to access each others disks and just end up with corrupted disks that don't work on either system.

Once you have this configured correctly you can proceed to attach the ESX servers to the SAN fabric.
Next configure zoning in the SAN switches so that the each ESX server is in its own zone along with the MSA (which should be how the zones for the windows servers are configured).

Now you should be able to create a new disk on the MSA and present it to only the ESX servers. Do a rescan from within the vSphere client and hey presto you should be able to see the new drive on your ESX systems (Might need to run the rescan twice).

ESX has inbulit multipathing support so nothing extra to install for that

[Sean Ahearn]

Yes, we do have dual fiber connections for the windows servers and we do have them for the ESX servers. We have 2 SAN switches between the MSA and the servers. 2 different fabrics. We have available ports and we do zoning.

How can I check how the LUN presentation is configured? Im pretty sure the servers can only see their specific LUNs but I want to be sure.

[Mark Wibaux]

Manage > Volume Management > Volume Mapping > Map Hosts To Volume

When you select an individual volume you should be able to see the "Current Host-Volume Relationships"