Brocade 825 HBA Adapter Direct connect to storage

[gorx]

Hello,

I have some problem with direct connection of Brocade 825 HBA at ESXi Host to HP Eva P6350.

The problem is in paths detection to storage. Sometimes i saw in vSphere client that BR 825 connected with EVA

at 1st port. And there are no any info about connection when i click to the secont port.

For example when i perform reboot of Esxi host - Then in vSphere client i saw ANOTHER port connected to EVA and

no info about 1st port. Also i have 3rd situation when I saw 2 port normally connected to EVA:

1st in Active I/O

2nd in Active mode.

So I have misunderstanding why it happens.

Noticed that I can see two ports connected to Eva(3rd situation) when I not just reboot host, but reboot and also just

enter in HBA BIOS and exit. A

HBAs configured in loop mode with BCU.

I have installed last bios verion v.3.2.3 to HBA, also installed the same version of HBA driver to ESXi.

Thank you.

Regards, Egor

[DavoudTeimouri]

First, about your SAN connection, I think, you have to check your zoning on your SAN switches. May be, both ports are configured for a target.

About second situation, when you are using Round-Robin as multi-pathing policy, you have two types of paths: Optimized and non-optimized.

Optimized paths or active I/O paths have access to LUN via the storage processor which it's owner of the LUN.

Non-optimized paths don't have access to LUN directly and if optimized paths have problem, the host can access to the LUN via non-optimized paths and other storage processor. By default, Round-Robin use optimized paths for down IO commands.

[gorx]

i haven't SAN switches - this is direct connection...

and at HP Control Panel(EVA managment) I have added 2 HOSTs and ports for them. There are no

any additional options there.

About optimized/not optimized:

i described situation when I shutdown Storage and Host. After booting again I see connection at 2 port:

Active I/O (i think it is optimized)

Active (not optimized)

[gorx]

it seems that direct attach config is not supported between EVA P6350 and Brocade HBA 825 at ESXi.

I have find compatibility matrix from hp:

http://h20272.www2.hp.com/Content/ConfigurationSetDetailView.aspx?Id=65455&FromCache=1

where direct attach with this HBA decribed as unsupported.