Pre Requisites to check before SAN switch upgrade

[Ravindra01]

Hi All,

   We are planning to upgrade FC switches ( BROCADE FC5022 and ESXi 6.0) in our environment, the upgrade activity will be done by SAN team.

   Any one please let me know ? what are things we need to check from VMware side and there will by any impact to the running VM's ??

   Native multi pathing is configured i.e Round Robin.

Thanks in advance..!!

[rcporto]

You should check if you have paths to storage in different Fabrics, to avoid downtime during the switch upgrade. For example, some environment are configured with 2-4 paths, with half of these paths using different set of switches.

[Ravindra01]

Hi Richardson,

  Thanks for reply.

   We have 4 paths to storage and multipathing is configured as RR,  two HBA for each host, each HBA with 2 ports connecting to 2 switches.

   In this case how the paths will failure ??

[rcporto · Accepted solution]

Assuming that all paths are online, if you disable one of your SAN switches, two paths will fail and traffic will flow through the two remaining paths. After the switch come back online, VMware will redistribute I/O through all four paths.