Zoning and cabling between MDS dual fabric/VSAN and VNX5000

[whitetrack]

Hi,

Need your advice guys,

We have a design with cisco UCS B series dual Fabric interconnect and dual MDS san switch with one storage VNX5500.

I am actually doing the zoning but i need to determine what is the best practice cabling and zoning. and i don't have powerpath installed in the vmware side:

1st Design :

The zoning will be

vhba1--b4  

vhba1--b6  

vhba1--a4

vhba1--a6

vhba2--b5

vhba2--b7

vhba2--a5

vhba2--a7

or

2nd design

vhba1--b4

vhba1--b5  

vhba1--b6

vhba1--b7

vhba2--a4

vhba2--a5

vhba2--a6

vhba2--a7

Is there a best practice ? what is the advantage of 1st or 2nd design, what is the best for performance or redundancy ?

A second question is does Vhba1 and Vhba2 will work simultaneously ? if yes what about round robin, is it just about fc path ?

[whitetrack]

My choice actually is the first one because if we loose mds1 we still have a path from Vhba2 via md2 to SPB so LUN can stay on SPB and no risk for LUN trespass or huge use of BUS cmi between SP. Please confirm if i am right

[dynamox]

you are correct, definitely option 1. VMware native MPIO will do a pretty good job of load-balancing I/O so by having SPA and SPB ports on each fabric you will engage both HBAs in round-robin fashion. UCS FIs in host-end mode ?

[pala]

Please go with the first design. That is what industry standard and best practice.