Installation requirements, Recommended mitigations, Supported configurations – HP 6400.8400 Enterprise Virtual Array User Manual
Page 116: General configuration components
Installation requirements
•
The host must be placed in a zone with any EVA worldwide IDs (WWIDs) that access storage
devices presented by the hierarchical storage virtualization (HSV) controllers to the single path
HBA host. The preferred method is to use HBA and HSV WWIDs in the zone configurations.
•
On HP-UX, Solaris, Microsoft Windows Server, Linux, and IBM AIX operating systems, the
zones consist of the single path HBA systems and one HSV controller port.
•
On OpenVMS and Tru64 UNIX operating systems, the zones consist of the single HBA systems
and two HSV controller ports. This will result in a configuration where there are two paths per
device, or multiple paths.
Recommended mitigations
EVA is designed for the mission-critical enterprise environment. When used with multi-path software,
high data availability and fault tolerance are achieved. In single path HBA server configurations,
neither multi-path software nor redundant I/O paths are present. Server-based operating systems
are not designed to inherently recover from unexpected failure events in the I/O path (for example,
loss of connectivity between the server and the data storage). It is expected that most operating
systems will experience undesirable behavior when configured in non-high-availability configurations.
Because of the risks of using servers with a single path HBA, HP recommends the following actions:
•
Use servers with a single path HBA that are not mission-critical or highly available.
•
Perform frequent backups of the single path server and its storage.
Supported configurations
All examples detail a small homogeneous Storage Area Network (SAN) for ease of explanation.
Mixing of dual and single path HBA systems in a heterogeneous SAN is supported. In addition to
this document, reference and adhere to the SAN Design Reference Guide for heterogeneous SANs,
located at:
General configuration components
All configurations require the following components:
•
Enterprise XCS software
•
HBAs
•
Fibre Channel switches
Connecting a single path HBA server to a switch in a fabric zone
Each host must attach to one switch (fabric) using standard Fibre Channel cables. Each host has
its single path HBA connected through switches on a SAN to one port of an EVA.
Because a single path HBA server has no software to manage the connection and ensure that only
one controller port is visible to the HBA, the fabric containing the single path HBA server, SAN
switch, and EVA controller must be zoned. Configuring the single path by switch zoning and the
LUNs by Selective Storage Presentation (SSP) allows for multiple single path HBAs to reside in the
same server. A single path HBA server with OpenVMS or Tru64 UNIX operating system should
be zoned with two EVA controllers. See the HP SAN Design Reference Guide at the following HP
website for additional information about zoning:
To connect a single path HBA server to a SAN switch:
1.
Plug one end of the Fibre Channel cable into the HBA on the server.
2.
Plug the other end of the cable into the switch.
and
represent configurations containing both single path
HBA server and dual HBA server, as well as a SAN appliance, connected to redundant SAN
116
Single Path Implementation