looking for assistance with IVR

[jeff.thurman]

Our current environment consists of two MDS9509s running on VSAN 1.  We have recently acquired a new customer that has its own SAN environment consisting of two MDS 9509s, one with VSAN 10 and the other with VSAN 20.  We have a need for hosts on VSANs 10 and 20 to see our SAN Volume Controllers on VSAN 1 and I am planning to use IVR to do this.  They currently have VSAN 1 on their switches as well, but there is no active zoneset or zones configured in VSAN 1.  Now that I have described the topology, here are my questions:

1) Can I just enable IVR on the new 9509s since VSAN1 is adjacent to the VSANs on each of their switches (they already have the appropriate license)?

2) Because there are separate VSANs, are there any issues with merging the fabrics?  Will this occur automatically when we connect the environments with an ISL link?

[Michael Brown]

The switches with VSAN 10 and 20, are they isolated from each other, or are there hosts on both switches in VSAN 10 and 20?  You could enable the ISLs between all the switches, but prune it to only transport VSAN1.  This would be the easiest option, this way VSAN 1 could merge, and you would still keep VSAN 10 and 20 isolated.  Then on the MDS with VSAN 1 and VSANs 10 and 20 you could enable IVR.

Be careful to only enable IVR on the switches that will be making the VSAN hop.  Each switch were IVR is enabled must have the same IVR topology and ivr zonesets configured.  The easiest way is to use CFS for IVR and then propagate the configuration amongst the MDS to be sure it is the same in each switch.

On the MDS where you plan to run IVR configure the IVR distribute.

config t

ivr distribute

Then when you generate the IVR vsan topology, you only need to enter it on 1 switch, and then issue 'ivr commit' to push the config to the other switches.

If you build the config, post it here and we can make sure it looks correct.

-Mike

[jeff.thurman]

The VSAN 10 switch is isolated from the VSAN 20 switch.  I don't see a need to join the two switches via VSAN 1.  We can keep them separated and that should not require us to have the IVR zonesets match as they would be in two separate fabrics, correct?  I have attached a simple diagram that lays out the connections.