Reply to Message

Hello,

on the FC comment about the hosts needing more ports in a multi san environment.

That assumes you had two more fiber switches. I thought you could just connect the other san to the same set of fc switches? Is that not possible?

THis depends on how your fabric is interconnected. Personally I have all SANs feed to the edge switches which eventually go to the hosts. Generally 2 FC-HBA ports are enough, but I have seen some with 4 FC-HBA ports or more that do not suffer any issues. When you have more FC-HBA you can zone SANs to specific FC-HBAs so that you do not have bandwidth or other issues.

Whether or not this is necessary depends on what you are doing within the VMs more than it depends on anything else. Quite a few people do not need more than 2 FC-HBAs. But remember zoning in very important you do not want to zone all your arrays to just one FC-HBA unless you are in a failover case. You need to by hand balance the load.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

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

Blue Gears and SearchVMware Pro Blogs: http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Blog_Roll

Top Virtualization Security Links: http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Top_Virtualization_Security_Links