VMAX 10K Single Engine (Port Group Question)

Duhhas, What is the VMAX model you have and how many engines are installed?

thanks a bunch Cody Hosterman so the issue is just that, the only ports I've configured for this host are located on the same director which would cause the issue when part gets replaced?

Hard to say. Could be any number of reasons I suppose. There is some redundancy protection here in the case of a port failure but not in the case of a director failure. But just to spitball some possibilities it could be that the port settings on the other director are incompatible with whatever host you have connected to director 1 or even incompatible protocols. Maybe the cabling wasnt complete and the hosts couldnt be connected to the other director at the time and it was just never added when the cabling was complete. Maybe the other director is for some reason segregated on another SAN which that host or the switches to that host are not connected to. There are other possibilities but they are increasingly unlikely.

thanks again Cody Hosterman any reason why you can think of why it would of been configured this way?  i only ask because I know emc was heavily involved with the design and initial configuration and i'm guessing it was at their recommendation that we configured each port group for hosts and clusters to have ports defined from either one side or the other

VMaxe

As Cody pointed out many reasons might be behind this design, The best design will be the design that eliminates a SPOF (Single Point of Failure) so always try to mask at least one port from each Dir with same Port FLAGs set  and present it to machines running same OS for instance 1f:0 and 2f:0 for Windows hosts, 1e:0 and 2e:0 for Solaris etc..

This configuration should pass the.HA tests. So you should check now for any available FAs ports that can be added to your host port group.For example, For Windows the FLAGs C,OS2007,SPC2,SC3 should be set on the FA port. If you found another FA port with same FLAG set then you can add it to your server port group. The steps to do so should be as follows:

1- Find the eligible FA by running the command: symcfg -sid xx -v -dir all list -->This command will list all FAs you have and the FLAGs set on ports.

2- Zone your host HBAs to the new FA port

3- Add the new FA port to your port group using this command: symaccess -sid xxx -type port -name xxxxx add -dirport fa:port

4- The last command will automatically map your devices to the new FA port so now you can remove one of the FA ports above and to do so

• You will have to take your devices write disabled on the FA ports either 1e:0 or 1f:0 using the command:
  symdev -sid xxx write_disable -fa x -p y
• Unmap the devices from the FA port using symconfigure -sid xxx -cmd "unmap dev from dir fa:port;" -nop commit

Now, running symdev show against any of your devices should return only 2 FA ports one from each director and this configuration should pass the HA test.

Hope it helps

Mohammed Salem @yankoora

thanks to both of M.Salem  and Cody Hosterman for the great education and feedback, will help me move past this issue.