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Question
Wednesday, March 23, 2016 11:02 AM
My scenario:
I have a DS3400 DISK SYSTEM DUAL CONTROLLER FIBRE CHANNEL storage equipped with two controllers each equipped with two 4-GBPS FC ports, for a total of four FC ports.
Then I have four servers each equipped with one IBM 4-GBPS FC SINGLE-PORT PCI-E HBA card.
I'm trying to setup a Windows 2012-R2 Hyper-V cluster.
It is sufficient that I connect each server to one of the four FC ports of the DS3400 or I need some sort of FC switch to obtain the fact that if one storage's controller crash the cluster still obtain access to the storage ?
Thank you for any support !
Ivano C.
Ivano Carrara
All replies (3)
Wednesday, March 23, 2016 3:53 PM âś…Answered
"What is "FC clusters" expecially ?"
A failover cluster that uses Fibre Channel storage.
Okay, looking at your configuration, you will not be able to properly configure a highly available FC cluster. I apologize. I glanced at your configuration the first time and did not read all the details.
"servers each equipped with one IBM 4-GBPS FC SINGLE-PORT PCI-E HBA card"
Each server will need two HBAs so each server can connect to both FC controllers in the storage array. You will then need to configure MPIO on each server.
In your environment, technically a switch would not be needed because you have four ports on each of the FC controllers in the SAN array, but it is not an optimal configuration because each server is going to use one of those ports on each controller (when you get the second HBA in each server). That means you cannot get any more than those four servers connected to the array. It makes more sense to have two switches in between. That way you would only need two connections from each switch, for a total of two ports used on the storage array. Then you could connect many more than four nodes to the storage array by connecting them to the switches.
. : | : . : | : . tim
Wednesday, March 23, 2016 12:17 PM
A switch is just that - a switch. It is not going to provide any additional intelligence into the environment. If your hardware supports direct attach, and you properly configure it, you should not need a switch. I know I have configured direct attach FC clusters without issues.
. : | : . : | : . tim
Wednesday, March 23, 2016 2:07 PM
What you mean with "I have configured direct attach FC clusters " ??
What is "FC clusters" expecially ?
If you connect two servers to the two FC ports of the first controller, what about if this controller crashes ?
I don't think that the two servers switches automatically to the second FC controller :-)
Ummm ... I don't think you reply is appropriate
Thank you anyway !
Ivano C.
Ivano Carrara