Best Practices For Fiber Channel Host Connectivity
Best Practices For Fiber Channel Host Connectivity
Best Practices For Fiber Channel Host Connectivity
support.infinidat.com/hc/en-us/articles/202404251
Each physical host should be zoned to all 3 storage nodes via at least 2 independent
HBA ports (initiators) on 2 independent SAN fabrics.
A maximum 1-to-3 fan-out from host (initiator) to storage (target) port should
normally be used. Thus for a host with two HBA ports, there will be 2 x 3 = 6 paths
per LUN. For a host with 4 HBA ports, there will be 4 x 3 = 12 paths per LUN.
Zones should be created as single-initiator WWPN zones. Thus each zone will
normally have a maximum of 4 WWPNs assigned: 1 WWPN from the host (initiator)
and 3 from the storage (target).
As discussed in the previous section, hosts should only use supported and properly
configured multipathing software to ensure proper load balancing across the storage
nodes and maximum performance.
The table below shows examples of common host port configurations with the
maximum theoretical BW achievable for either read or write. Performance for any
individual host will depend heavily on the actual host I/O profile.
Physical cabling
To achieve the recommended zoning goals, the physical cabling between the SAN fabrics
and InfiniBox needs to be performed in a manner consistent with maximizing both
performance and availability. This means cabling two separate SAN fabrics to each
InfiniBox target HBA with as many connections as necessary to support the host
infrastructure. Typical installations either use 12 of the InfiniBox FC ports or all 24 of them.
Consider the diagram below as a basic guide for the physical cabling, where each green line
represents 2-4 physical connections between the InfiniBox and the SAN fabrics.
As stated previously, when connecting InfiniBox to the Fiber Channel fabric, special care
has to be taken to connecting ports from all three nodes and their HBAs to each switch. To
avoid confusion, InfiniBox comes with a simple, color-coded patch panel that makes the
cabling simpler. There are two types of patch panels, depending on the release.
Recommended configuration
The InfiniBox storage system has three Nodes, each has 8 fiber-channel ports.
It is recommended that each switch will be connected to each node with 2 or more FC:
This will also allow each host to connect to two different target ports from 2 different target
HBAs. Zoning should be done such that each initiator sees one port from each of the three
nodes.
That is, each initiator should have 1(initiator ports) * 3(nodes) * 2(target ports per
node) = 6 paths.
Example
In the following example, the host has two initiators. Each initiator is connected to two
ports on each node, 6 paths in total:
It is recommended for every host to have two independent initiators, to avoid a single-
point-of-failure on the host side.
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