Why did I put devices in different VSANs ?

[gaskincharles]

I am normally don't deal with the SAN storage side of the house often and coming up I am having to replace our 9124 MDS switches with 9148 fabric switches. I was going to just copy and paste configs over to the new switch, but after looking at the configuration I noticed that I put our SAN in a separate Vsan than our servers, which have two HBA's per server that are in Vsan 200 and 201. The SAN is in VSAN 10.

I know the concepts of the vsans and vlans are somewhat similar, but I do not know why I did it at the time. Can anyone shed some light as to why i should not just add the SAN to VSAN 200 or 201 and keep it moving ?

I have two controllers and two HBA's per controller.

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[dynamoxxx · Accepted solution]

i assume when you say SAN you actually mean your storage array ? I don't see you would need to put your storage array into one VSAN and your hosts into another. The only way they can communicate at that point is through using IVR but i don't see why you would need that. Let me give you an example why one would do that.

1) I have a tape library with many tape drives, this library is shared by many business units. I have dedicated VSAN for tape traffic (VSAN 10)

2) Business unit A needs to connect to this library, even though their server is located in VSAN 15, they can use IVR to get to VSAN 10

3) Business unit B is in the same boat as business unit A, they want to get to this tape library from VSAN 20, so they will use IVR as well.

Keep it simple, if these storage/tape resources are dedicated for specific servers put them in the same VSAN with hosts.

[gaskincharles]

Thank you for the response. This is exactly what I needed to know and this was what I was thinking, but I didn't know why I set up the storage array unit in that method the first time. But this helps clarify .

Thank you

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