MDS-9124/9148 and Zoning

[doug_3002]

We are trying to migrate an application away from a single controller to a FAS3210HA we have had in place for a year.  This will help alleviate two SPOF's, (1) single controller and (2) adding another FC SAN Switch.  Also we will get away from the misaligned LUNs as long as our System Engineer do the partition on his side correctly and configures MP on the Solaris side.

I have a few questions around zoning the SAN, since I have never done this.

1. Can we add new a new zone to an existing active zone set or will we have to re-activate the existing zone set?

2. What impact will it have adding a new zone to an active zone set?

3. When we add a new Cisco MDS 9148 and it's connected to the MDS 9124, that we already have in place, will it walk us thru setting up HA between the two SAN switches?

My intent was to connect the FAS3210HA to the current SAN switch, create a LUN so that our System Engineer can figure out how to do his work on the Solaris side using ZFS and MP since he will have multiple paths to the NetApp that he did not have previously with the FAS3140 as only FC port 0a was zoned in the VSAN Zone Set.

Thank you, 

David

[Walter Dey]

Hi David

I don't exactly understand what you try to achieve; here my 2c

1. Can we add new a new zone to an existing active zone set or will we have to re-activate the existing zone set?You

You add the new zone to the zoneset, and then you have to activate this zoneset, to make the change active; which is nondisruptive for any existing zones.

2. What impact will it have adding a new zone to an active zone set?

see above

3. When we add a new Cisco MDS 9148 and it's connected to the MDS 9124, that we already have in place, will it walk us thru setting up HA between the two SAN switches?

I thought you would setup a dual fabric with this 2 FC switches, with no ISL links in between them; storage and host would be multihomed; 2 different VSAN for fabric A resp B. Zoning and active Zoneset per fabric and VSAN.

Walter.