How to assign/determine SCSI Target designation

[vvarnell]

Hi all,

Question: How can I determine/assign which of multiple SAN-based storage systems will be assigned SCSI Target 1, SCSI Target 2, etc.?

Why: I recently added a second storage system (for D/R and Testing) to my ESX environment and it was discovered/assigned as SCSI Target 0, which threw off all of my existing Production LUNs (they were on SCSI Target 0 and became SCSI Target 1.)

Environment:

1. ESX 3.0.2 U2

2. 16 x Dell 6850 hosts

3. QLogic HBA's

4. 2 x Brocade 4900 SAN switches,no ISL's (each switch is an island), port zoning in use ("hard zoning")

5. 1 x Hitachi Data Systems 9585v storage system presenting 98 x 256GB LUNs (the existing PRODUCTION LUNs)

6. 1 x Hitachi Data Systems AMS 200 storage system presenting 16 x 256GB LUNs (the new D/R and Test LUNs that became SCSI Target 0)

This is an important consideration for me because I certainly do NOT want to mess up or complicate my production environment and sometime next year I will be adding another storage system to replace the 9585v (vendor/manufacturer TBD). So, how are the SCSI Targets discovered or assigned? By ESX? If so, where? By the SAN Zoning? By the HBA BIOS? How can I pin down a specific storage system to a specific SCSI target designation?

[Texiwill]

Hello,

I suggest contacting your Support Representative for VMware on this one, to get the details. I imagine it is a combination of where the controller is in the PCI bus plus zoning. I have seen what you described but it has not been a huge issue as the VMFS is accessed via UID and the name you give it.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

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Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

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