zoning question

[Anonymous]

Does anyone know if you have a vmware host with an HBA, and it needs to connect to multiple different storage systems on the same switch, is it better to create multiple zones and do a 1:1.    Or just create one zone for that HBA and add all the different types of storage systems into that zone?

Is there a best practice, any reason to do one over the other?

Thanks

[minosi]

Basic rule is one initiator zoning.

Doing 1:1 you can in essence never do bad. (outside zoning DB scaling in really big ENVs)

You definitely do NOT want to have two storage boxes zoned together via host zoning.

More so if they are of the same type.

Choose anything between:

1 initiator WWPN - 1 target WWPN

up to

1 initiator WWPN - 1 storage box

And you should be good.

[Anonymous]

Thanks that is what I thought but wanted to double check.

Is it ok to have say 4 different zones for the same HBA of a host like this:

Zone 1:

vmware hba1

Storage1

Zone 2:

vmware hba1

Storage2

Zone 3:

vmwarehba1

Storage 3

Zone4:

vmwarehba 1

Storage 4

So it the same HBA card in each of those zones but will still be able to access all 4 different storage systems with luns on each one?  I am not sure what th performance implications can be.

In the past I have only worked with one large enterprise storage system, and only need one zone per HBA, but here they have many smaller entry level storage.

Thanks

[minosi]

Yes that is ok.

Performance implications are none whatsoever.

Unless you have really big environment (1.000s of zones) it does not matter if you have 2 WWPN/zone or 8 WWPN/zone.

Important for performance is to properly design your physical infrastructure like ISL's etc.

In zoning, maybe, not overdo on multi-pathing (but that heavily depends on host OS and storage type).