Zoning on HP SAN

[NHATech]

We have been having some issues recently that has made me re-examine the SAn config on our production VM environment.

We have an HP EVA 5000 with dual fabrics. The vmware hosts are all running Dell 2950's with QLA2432 Adapters (7 hosts in total). ESX3.5, VC2.5

When this was all put together about 6 months ago, I did the zoning under the direction of a consultant.

He had me create a single zone that contained the hosts and EVA ports. I'm wondering if that is the best or even recomended way to do the configuration.

I have been doing some searching for documents, and nothing I can find on the HP or VMWare sites explicitly say how the zoneing should be done.

I have been looking at another zoning setup that is used for a MS cluster and I see in that setup, there is a seperate zone for each host.

Should I have a seperate zone for each host? Will having all the hosts in a single large zone (with the eva) cause issues?

[depping]

One zone for ESX is just fine. You want every ESX host to see the same any way. If you want to limit certain lun's to specific esx host than just set it up via the access list in the EVA Command View software.

Duncan

My virtualisation blog:

[bggb29]

You can zone from your switch but if you want to share the luns across all hosts you may want to leave your current config alone.

We run a eva and a cx with all esx hosts seeing all luns.

Having all the hosts will not cause you problem, zoning may in fact increase the complexity of manging lun access for your hosts

[b_o_f_h]

If you want to use HA/DRS/Vmotion between your ESX Servers, you need to promote the LUN's to all of your ESX Servers - so one Zone.

In case your SAN is not just for ESX and you hava LUN's for Windows Servers, ... located on the SAN, you need explicit zoning to prevent access from Windows Server to the ESX LUN's (just scanning the LUN's can already kill the ESX LUN's because Windows writes his signature).

[Schorschi]

Old school was one ESX host per zone but common LUNs published to many zones, i.e. ESX hosts. New school is 1 zone with many ESX hosts and LUNs in said zone. The term many is relative to your environment of course. VCB requries new school approach, this is per VMware, and on HP MSAs and EVAs we had some really odd issues with VCB with a old school approach, or if no zoning was done (for HP MSA, SSP is not sufficent alone).

Side note... VCB does not handle default no zone well on HP storage, at least that was our experience. Recently we had some real pain with EVA4x00 configurations and ESX 3.0.2 on HP blades, turned out it was a bad fiber module in the bad chassis that was shown stable in the HP agents and HP on-board admin, but was flakey. Usually HP monitoring does a good job, but in this specific case, it did not. HP took the bad module back to crack open and analyze if they given us any more detail I will provide the community what we learn.

[java_cat33]

Hi NHATech - how is your performance etc of your VM's on the EVA 5000 SAN? Reason I ask is that I've got a client who's looking at upgrading to 3.5 using their EVA 5000. I spoke to HP yesterday and their storage team advised that the 5000 is still not supported.

Have you found any issues etc?

Thanks