We have a fibre SAN that I would like to zone out for two separate "servers"
Server #1 IBm Blade Center H chassis with two HS20 blades. Vmware ESX server a few servers on each blade dsk files and vmx files are stored on the FastT
Server #2 dell Poweredge w/ fibre channel card
Storage: FastT 600 Turbo two LUNs (900GB and 700GB)
Currently, Our Blades have access directly to the 900GB partition. The Dell is setup to be able to access the 700GB partition but is not zoned to do so.
What I would like to accomplish is..... 1. Allow the Blades access to the 700GB partition. 2. Allow the Dell to be access to "read" access to both 700 and 900 gb partitions.
Reason being, I would like the Dell server to be able to directly access all files stored on the FAstT partitions such as dsk and vmx for backup purposes. We will be configuring VCB to pull these files onto the Dell server, which also run Backup Exec for our regular file backups.
Hope this makes sense to someone......I basically want to zone the servers so all can see the attached storage files, but the Blades still technically "own" the files......I.e. they are the only ones that can modify the files.
If you add the host(from the servers that you want to see) in you storage management this those not work?
Access to the storage, is made on the storage management . In your luns(or RAID Groups) you can add the host of the servers that can see/work with that LUN
I'm not sure where I would define that that host can see that partition. For the FastT manager, we use the IBM Storage Manager and the SAN switches are managed via a webpage. so my questions for that are 1. Where do I give a Host LUN permissions -and- 2. If I give a Windows Server 2003 box access to the LUN, won't it take it over? I have heard that this is the case when servers share LUNs.
On the other end of it.... The SAN is not currently zoned at all so...When I connect the Dell server to the SAN switch via fibre cable, it does not recognize the connection in Windows. The Link lights on both ends are on, but the little "network connection" icon says "cable disconnected"
I assume I have to zone the whole SAN separately to give it access.
My question is how to zone so that both a Windows server and Vmware server can share a LUN ...But the Windows server can only read the data, not write to it.
I don't think you can do it mate, only one system can access the same Lun at one time, unless using a cluster. The read-only part would be done on your storage appliance, I'm not familiar with the IBM but what about scripting some kind of clone, and presenting the clone out as read-only to the other host, you could update the clone on a daily basis?
Zoning basically just says this server can see this storage appliance.
Take a snapshot of the LUN you want to take a backup of and present that as R/W data to the backup server.
You might have to pay license for snapshots; it's nothing to do with zoning (which you have in the title) but it is what you have to do if you want to backup by a second server accessing the "same" data.
We would like to use the Windows server (running Backup Exec) to be able to backup the DSK and VMX files directly, without having to pull over the network instead.
Since we have a few large DSK files, we figured the best method of accessing it was by connecting it directly to the SAN through the fibre channel.
Also you can use in the Virtual Center the tool WinSCP to connect to your VMware Servers, and to the LUNs. From that you can copy from the VMware Server to the Virtual Center
Or you can use in your VMware backup scripts to backup the files to any LUN
So there are very different ways to backup your files.
To have a good comunication and better performance between copy VMware and Virtual Center, add the Virtual Center host to your Storage configuration on the LUNs that you want to backup.
All you need to do is zone the backup server to the CX, your backup exec and vcb will read the data on the disks but the backup server does not have to be host in order to read the LUNS, this is taken care of through VC
That is right. On the switch side you need to zone the CX, VMWare hosts and backup server all together and that is it really. On your backup server in disk manager you will see the disks (LUNS) on the CX but you will not be able to browse them from My Computer like a typical drive. In backup exec you will select which VM to backup. If you have a look in backup exec at a complete job you will see the vmx files that are backed up.
