Add a host to two different storage groups

It's not supported. That said, it can be done, but it involves configuring the host differently, manually registering the host and using multiple HBA's. It's not pretty, it's not supported but it could work.

The only configuration is with boot-from-san that you can find in the OS Installation guide on mydocuments.emc.com.

glen

what are you trying to do ?

Trying to figure out if it is a good idea to have UCS servers configured with two HBAs - HBA0 and HBA1 - dedicated to boot from san, and two HBAs - HBA2 and HBA3 - configured for LUN access. Therefore they have to be separated into two different storage groups. At least this is how I thought it should be done if it is supported and can be achieved.

it's really up to you, i see two options:

1) create extra HBAs in your UCS profile, one of set of HBAs will be use for Boot from SAN and reside in dedicated storage group, another set of HBAs will reside in a "shared" storage group (let's for an ESX farm)

2) just use two HBAs, each host will have its own storage group that will contain Boot from SAN LUNs as well as "shared" LUNs.

I was talking about option 1. The question is, when the 2 extra HBAs login to the storage, they will have the same host name associated with it, so I will not be able to put them into a different storage group, as you cannot have the same host in different storage groups. What can be a way around it?

De-register the initiators from the boot vHBA's, manually create a new host record and add them manually into it. Done.

i never use navi agent so everything gets registered manually.

You don't really need to use four HBA's with two just for boot - there's no benefit that know of.

If you want boot from san and also want to share LUNs with other host, just create a separate Storage Group with one Host, the boot LUN as HLU 0 (zero) and the shared LUNs. Each host would have a separate Storage Group and a separate boot LUN and the shared LUNs. This is the recommended configuration.

glen

glen wrote: You don't really need to use four HBA's with two just for boot - there's no benefit that know of. If you want boot from san and also want to share LUNs with other host, just create a separate Storage Group with one Host, the boot LUN as HLU 0 (zero) and the shared LUNs. Each host would have a separate Storage Group and a separate boot LUN and the shared LUNs. This is the recommended configuration. glen

do you know how painful it is to add storage to individual storage groups if you have 16 node cluster ?

I've never managed a data center, so no I do not know all the difficulties, but I have heard about them (and I feel your pain). I imagine the same would apply switch zoning when you nust use single initiator-single target zoning.

glen

Zoning can be a rather 'mouse-intensive' process, but there are work arounds.

If I am making minor adjustments, I generally use the fabric administration GUI (Brocade Network Advisor...).

For larger changes I tend to export the zoneset, edit in the changes, and import.  BNA still syntax checks things, but I have templates for things like adding a host or a storage unit to my larger clusters.  Procedurally, I add any new aliases that will be required, export that zoneset and then edit the appropriate templates and merge them in, then re-import the end product and activate it.

For storage management, I will say that administering clusters that require some dedicated LUNs in addition to their shared LUNs is a weakness in Unisphere.  I have used other storage products that handled it much more gracefully.  In general what you would see is a cluster object which owns both hosts and LUNs, and within it, the hosts were also allowed to own LUNs in addition to inheriting the LUNs their cluster owned.

I am happy to say that I do not have any such clusters at the moment, so it is a moot point for me right now, but there definitely are use cases which would support changing Unisphere to handle this better.