Recommended Mitigations; Supported Configurations; General Configuration Components; Connecting A Single Path Hba Server To A Switch In A Fabric Zone - HP StorageWorks 4400 User Manual

• On HP-UX, Solaris, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (32-bit), Windows 2000, Novell NetWare,
Linux and IBM AIX operating systems, the zones consist of the single path HBA systems and one
HSV controller port.
• On OpenVMS, the zones consist of the single HBA systems and two HSV controller ports. This
results in a configuration where there are two paths per device, or multiple paths.
NOTE:
Windows 2000 Datacenter operating system is not currently supported.

Recommended mitigations

EVA is designed for the mission-critical enterprise environment. When used with multipath software,
high data availability and fault tolerance are achieved. In single path HBA server configurations,
neither multipath software nor redundant I/O paths are present. Server-based operating systems are
not designed to inherently recover from unexpected failure events in the I/O path (for example, loss
of connectivity between the server and the data storage). It is expected that most operating systems
will experience undesirable behavior when configured in non-high-availability configurations.
Because of the risks of using servers with a single path HBA, HP recommends the following actions:
• Use servers with a single path HBA that are not mission-critical or highly available.
• Perform frequent backups of the single path server and its storage.

Supported configurations

All examples detail a small homogeneous Storage Area Network (SAN) for ease of explanation.
Mixing of dual and single path HBA systems in a heterogeneous SAN is supported. In addition to
this document, reference and adhere to the SAN Design Reference Guide for heterogeneous SANs,
located at:
http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/san/documentation.html

General configuration components

All configurations require the following components:
• XCS controller software
• HBAs
• Fibre Channel switches

Connecting a single path HBA server to a switch in a fabric zone

Each host must attach to one switch (fabric) using standard Fibre Channel cables. Each host has its
single path HBA connected through switches on a SAN to one port of an EVA.
Because a single path HBA server has no software to manage the connection and ensure that only
one controller port is visible to the HBA, the fabric containing the single path HBA server, SAN switch,
and EVA controller must be zoned. Configuring the single path by switch zoning and the LUNs by
Selective Storage Presentation (SSP) allows for multiple single path HBAs to reside in the same server.
A single path HBA server with the OpenVMS operating system should be zoned with two EVA
56 Single path implementation