boot from SAN and number of HBAs

[Marek Tomaszewski]

Hello,

I have question about numbers of vHBAs for server which boots from SAN. Should I use 2 vHBAs only for boot, and another 2 for data or I should create only 2 vHBAs in service profile and use them for all kind of traffic ? Which design is proper or wrong ?

[Walter Dey]

Hi

Both methods are possible. I usually prefer to have 2 vhba's for boot (one on fabric A resp B) and 2 vhba's for data.

This would allow you to clearly separate the traffic by using separate VSAN's and/or storage subsystems.

As zoning is done per VSAN, it also gives you some protection against zoning configuration errors.

The downside is that you have double the number of fc zones, that you have to implement and maintain.

If you have only one pair of vhba's, the initiator pwwn for boot and data lun are identical, therefore you have to map this to different lun id's (lun masking / mapping on the array).

Hope that helps ?