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Moving connections to different VSAN's
Hello,
I have a question about moving ports in a VSAN to another VSAN. I have a customer with multiple MDS switches that are all ISL'ed together (they did not make 2 seperate fabrics due to single HBA hosts) so it shows as one big fabric. I know this is not a best practice but i am trying to correct this configuration.
THey have about 12 VSAN's that are connected to about 5 different arrays. THey do not have IVR so they have been taking one FE port from each SP and putting it into a VSAN. now with taht many VSAN's they are stretched pretty thin. I want to consolidate the VSAN's down so that i can get more then one pair of SP ports in any one VSAN to utilize the benefits of powerpath and such.
I am not sure of the steps i would need to do to move stuff from one VSAN to another.
I would think that for every host that i want to move, i would need to power it down and change the VSAN for that port. THen i would need to add new zones to the VSAN it was moved to?
If a host is dual homed, could i more one port at a time to the new VSAN's and keep it online?
THanks
AranH1
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May 20th, 2010 07:00
You could easily populate the VSAN that you are migrating your host and storage ports with all of their current zone information by editing the startup-config.txt file from the switch.
In the startup-config file a zone entry will look like this:
zone name SERVER1_HBA1_CX700_A0 vsan 1
member pwwn 21:00:00:0d:29:fa:45:82
member pwwn 50:06:01:60:30:60:2d:76
To create that same zone in VSAN 2 (this is your new consolidated VSAN in this example) just copy those lines into a new text file called newzones.txt and change the VSAN number:
zone name SERVER1_HBA1_CX700_A0 vsan 2
member pwwn 21:00:00:0d:29:fa:45:82
member pwwn 50:06:01:60:30:60:2d:76
Do this for every zone you want to copy to the consolidated VSAN. Then when your text file is complete just copy it to the running config:
switch# copy ftp:newzones.txt running-config
This way you can do all the work before hand and have all the zones created and available for activation once the ports have been moved over the to consolidated VSAN and the WWNs have been registered. Then all you have to do is insert the desired zones into the active zoneset and activate the changes.
dynamox
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20.4K Posts
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May 15th, 2010 08:00
yeah, moving ports between VSANs is disruptive but if your hosts have PowerPath, it's licensed and working properly you should be able to do it online. It should be a piece of cake for Windows/ESX/Linux ..for AIX/HPUX you might need to do some pre-work as these OS's rely on FCID and each VSANs uses different fcid so you may need to setup persistent fcid mapping.
SKT2
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1.3K Posts
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May 15th, 2010 23:00
As dynamox mentioned it can be done online, even for HPUX. Considering each LUN has at least two paths( one from each VSAN, only one VSAN is impacted at a time) then by one VSAN chnage you will have one dead(old) path and a corresponding new path . SO you can add new path to VG and remove the dead one. Repeat the same process for other VSAN chnage too. Even with ASM the path change is suppose to be transparent as the Power path takes take care of the path changes.
kenn2347
542 Posts
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May 17th, 2010 07:00
Unfortunately, they don't use licensed powerpath. I am trying to get it to the point where having multiple paths to each SP will give them the reason to purchase licenses. Right now, each VSAN has only one path to each SP so the licenses version really wont do much for them now. IF i remember right, they only have SP failover with unlicensed PP?
The ESX hosts are easy as I can put them in maintenance mode and move them over...
To bad there wasn't a way to copy the zones over to the new VSAN
kenn2347
542 Posts
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May 20th, 2010 06:00
hmmm so let say that there are zones in the zoneset you copy over that you dont want in the new VSAN, you just delete them before you commit and activate?
Wouldnt that be more of a merge action? wouldnt i have to merge the 2 zonesets instead of doing a restore. i would think the restore would overwrite the existing zones.
dynamox
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20.4K Posts
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May 20th, 2010 06:00
In fabric manager ..when you are in "edit local full zone database" mode, there is an option to backup "This VSAN Zones". After that you can restore them to another VSAN.
kenn2347
542 Posts
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May 20th, 2010 14:00
Thanks AranH
That should help