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Dell PowerVault ME5 Series Administrator's Guide

Attaching volumes to hosts

A volume must be attached to one or more hosts (or host groups) to enable them to access the volume.

You can attach a volume to hosts as part of creating the volume, or afterward. When attaching a volume you can choose whether to create new hosts, or to use existing hosts. For information about creating hosts, see Attaching volumes to hosts. When an attachment is created, the system automatically assigns a unique LUN to the volume, sets default permission access to read-write, and sets port access to all ports. After an attachment is created, you can change the LUN, port access, and access permissions. Both controllers share a set of LUNs, and any available LUN can be assigned to a volume. The storage system uses Unified LUN Presentation (ULP), which can expose all LUNs through all host ports on both controllers. The interconnect information is managed by the controller firmware. ULP appears to the host as an active-active storage system where the host can choose any available path to access a LUN regardless of which controller owns the storage pool the volume resides on. With ULP, the controllers' operating/redundancy mode is shown as Active-Active ULP. ULP uses the T10 Technical Committee of INCITS Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) extensions, in SPC-3, to negotiate paths with aware host systems. Unaware host systems see all paths as being equal.

NOTE LUN 0 is not used for SAS hosts.

The system also sets properties that specify whether the volume is attached to at least one host, whether the host was discovered, and whether the volume is accessible through redundant paths (through host ports in each controller module).

NOTE The secondary volume of a replication set cannot be attached to hosts. To enable such access, create a snapshot of the secondary volume and attach the snapshot to the host.
NOTE To avoid multiple hosts mounting the volume and causing data integrity issues, the host computer systems must be cooperatively managed, such as by using cluster software. If multiple hosts mount a volume without being cooperatively managed, volume data is at risk for data integrity failures.
CAUTION Volume attachment changes take effect immediately. Make changes to volumes when the volumes are not in use. Before changing a LUN, be sure to unmount the volume.

You can perform the following attachment actions:

  • View information about hosts attached to a volume (Provisioning > Volumes)
  • Attach volumes to hosts or host groups (Provisioning > Volumes > Attach to Hosts)
  • Detach volumes from hosts or host groups (Provisioning > Volumes > Detach from Hosts)
  • View information about volumes attached to a host (Provisioning > Hosts)
  • Attach hosts to volumes (Provisioning > Hosts > Attach to Volumes)
  • Detach hosts from volumes (Provisioning > Hosts > Detach from Volumes)

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