DMX & VMax FA to SAN Connections.

i don't believe rule 17 appies to Vmax. As far as zonning is concerned we have been following this practice documented on page 8 and 9

https://powerlink.emc.com/nsepn/webapps/btg548664833igtcuup4826/km/live1/en_US/Offering_Technical/White_Paper/h6209-symmetrix-vmax-vmware-virtual-infrastructure-wp.pdf

yeah, rule of 17 doesnt apply anymore

In VMAX the idea is to distribute the directors across the engines. So even w/o rule 17 u can achieve that. But rule of 17 still make sure that the directors ARE not distributed on  the same Engine.

The idea of the rule of 17 was to get redundant connections on different boards that were physically far away from one another.

You still want to do the same thing on VMAX.

And you can put the alternate paths on the same engine, as an engine has two redundant directors.    It is better to spread across different engine enclosures if possible.  You should not put the redundant paths on the same engine or worse, on the same IO module.

Rule of 17 was in place when the Symmetrix was a bus architecture.  By following rule of 17 you never had host connections on the same bus within the Symmetrix.  When the matrix was introduced (DMX3/4 series) it nullifyed the need for the rule of 17 and that is carried on with the V-Max engine build.  It tends to be easier if you set a standard for SAN connectivity.  With our arrays on the Symmetrix side we place odd directors in our odd san and all even directors to the even san.  Even on the V-max we still set our hosts up so that we follow the "rule of 17", its an easy standard to follow.

i thought rule 17 was all about connecting hosts to resources in different power zones. So on your Vmax you place odd FAs on one fabric and even on another ? I have one engine right now so i put odd and even on each fabric and each HBA gets zoned to odd and even FAs for a total of 4 paths per host (Clariion style zoning).

Thanks for the help...this thread has cleared up many issues.

In response to RobertDudley's post; putting even directors in one SAN and odd in another, is there any advantage to placing alternating ports in alternating SANs?  In other words 8e0, 8f0, 8g0, & 8h0 in SAN1 and 8e1, 8f1, 8g1, & 8h1 in SAN2?

And lastly, when our 2 engine VMax is delivered does the engine numbering start at 1 & 2, or 3 & 4? And what are the actual engine to director mappings; i.e. engine 3 (dirs 5 & 6), engine 4 (dirs 7 & 8)?

Rule of 17 was in use back in the Symm 3 days where there was an odd and even bus in each array.  There were events that could drop the bus (IE termination failure) so as long as the host was on both buses you (ideally) were not impacted.  Power zones were brought in with the DMX2000/3000 series and were not a factor in rule of 17.