Can you zone the fabric so that the head units cannot see each others LUNS? My DS4800 is a 2 head unit with four paths (two to each fabric). I've implemented masking at the fabric level.
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Jason D. Langdon
This space is for rent.
There are 2 ways you can cluster SAN on Netapp, that's one way, and the other is to have a dedicated link between them so when the Filer goes down there is seamless access to the LUN's. no delay in the Fiber access either since both paths are active. Netapp advised us that there are issues either way, and we all agreed that this way was much better. But now there just seems to be a problem with VCB, and it's not any faster anyway. I can go back to LAN backups, it was much easier, less hassle, and same speed, so that's what I will do.
Besides I can't run 64-bit and I wanted to make this backup machine a multi purpose Windows 2008 64-bit, so now I can, and use my previous machine for backups. I thought that VCB and SAN backup would make things faster, but it's just more trouble than its worth. I was advised at VM World this was the 'preferred' solution, but I don't see the benefit, other than taking load off the ESX servers.. but it's only network traffic, not a big deal and it's not really noticeable. Thanks for the help, but I am just going to go back to the other method.. and with vRanger I can't get a status of the backup. All I can see is success, but no time, no details unless I pull up the report. If I use LAN backup I can write my VM notes again with the backup details, and I can see at a glance when they were last backed up, I like that MUCH better 
Besides I can't run 64-bit and I wanted to make this backup machine a multi purpose Windows 2008 64-bit, so now I can, and use my previous machine for backups. I thought that VCB and SAN backup would make things faster, but it's just more trouble than its worth. I was advised at VM World this was the 'preferred' solution, but I don't see the benefit, other than taking load off the ESX servers.. but it's only network traffic, not a big deal and it's not really noticeable. Thanks for the help, but I am just going to go back to the other method.. and with vRanger I can't get a status of the backup. All I can see is success, but no time, no details unless I pull up the report. If I use LAN backup I can write my VM notes again with the backup details, and I can see at a glance when they were last backed up, I like that MUCH better
One thing to remember with LAN based backups is that you create more than network traffic on the ESX host. Most important is that you create considerable CPU and memory overhead at the console level. Depending upon the number of CPU's in your host and whether or not you have any VM's on that box that have multiple Virtulal CPU's you could possibly impact virtual machine performance as well during a LAN backup.
