Drive Paths / Canonical Paths and how to determine their source

[jonneybegood]

Hi All-

I'm trying to understand a confguration that was put together prior to my time in this roll. Within VMware infrastructure client I can see where a number of storage paths have been assigned to the ESX servers. The paths and canonical names mean nothing to me. Who do I determine what storage paths are assigned to what servers and what drives they represent on the respective servers? All storage physically comes from a SAN.

Appriciate any help on this matter

[kastlr]

Hi,

if you're using EMC equipment, you could use their free Storage Viewer Plugin.

It's available on Powerlink and will provide all infos regarding used storage arrays and LUNs.

No other vendors provide such a smart tool for ESX admins, you need to collect the required data from the logs.

Because you're talking about a SAN, do you have access to the zonesets of the involved switches/fabrics or at least the nameserver information as it usually contains the zones a WWN belongs to?

You could easily get the LUN WWN of each connected device which might be a good start.

Simply perform a ls /vmfs/devices/disks/vml* and read the following fantastic article to isolate the LUN WWN from the received output.

Understanding VMFS volumes

To get a list of all targets each HBA does see, perform the following for each HBA.

cat /proc/scsi/lpfc/[i]X[/i][/b]

The example is for Emulex HBA's, for QLogic you need to replace the lpfs with ql..... (not quite sure about the correct name).

Hope this helps a bit.

Greetings from Germany. (CET)