Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
storage to which all applicable hosts have access. Generally, this means that every ESXi host in a
vSphere environment must be zoned such that it can see each LUN. Also, every initiator (HBA
or CNA) needs to be zoned to all the front-end array ports that
could
present the LUN. So, what's
the best coni guration practice? The answer is single initiator/single target zoning. This creates
smaller zones, creates less cross talk, and makes it more difi cult to administratively make an
error that removes a LUN from all paths to a host or many hosts at once with a switch coni gura-
tion error.
Figure 6.9
h e Edit
Multipathing
Policies dialog box
shows the storage
runtime (short-
hand) name.
Figure 6.10
h ere are many ways
to confi gure zoning.
From left to right:
multi-initiator/multi-
target zoning, single-
initiator/multi-target
zoning, and single-
initiator/single-target
zoning.
Zone 1
Zone 1
Zone 2
Zone 1
Zone 2
Remember that the goal is to ensure that every LUN is visible to all the nodes in the vSphere
cluster. The left side of the i gure is how most people who are not familiar with Fibre Channel
start—multi-initiator zoning, with all array ports and all the ESXi Fibre Channel initiators in
one massive zone. The middle is better—with two zones, one for each side of the dual-fabric
Fibre Channel SAN design, and each zone includes all possible storage processors' front-end
ports (critically, at least one from each storage processor!). The right one is the best and recom-
mended zoning coni guration—single-initiator/single-target zoning—however this method
requires more administrative overhead to initially create all the zones.
