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April 5th, 2016 11:00
Moving an SC8000 FC to new SAN switches
I have an SC8000 FC connected to two Brocade Fabrics. There are two fault domains one to each Fabric. And we are using Virtual Ports.
All the hosts are VMware with an HBA connection to each Fabric.
We are replacing the Brocades with Cisco MDS. I am trying to go through my mind how I can move between the Switches with no downtime. My hosts are no problem. But how can I move the Array between the old Fabric and the new Fabric. Should I just remove the redunandt fiber from each Fault Domain to the new Switches? But if I do that, do I need to zone them out first? I have lots of things running through my head, but cant seem to put it in words. So looking for any assistance.
BVienneau
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April 5th, 2016 12:00
Since you have two fully redundant switch fabrics, you can just take a fabric offline and move it to the new switches. The fastest way to do this would be to pre-zone the new switches, move the SAN ports, then move the server ports. You should however make sure that your MPIO settings on your hosts are properly configured. They'll just see down paths during the process. We've done this a bunch of times for customers. The SAN will throw alerts, etc. but it's not going to cause the controllers to panic, etc.
jedijeff
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April 5th, 2016 12:00
Thanks. Our MPIO works as we have rebooted controllers before and had a Fabric go offline once. I guess my concern is the risk of corrupting data. I wonder if its worth disable the paths to a Fabric on the ESX hosts beforehand. Regarding the SC, literally just pull the fiber for all of one Fabric, and plug it back in to a pre-zoned Cisco? Not sure if I can pre-zone it though. And then at that point I guess you need to move a connection from your hosts to the new Fabric so they are split now between a Brocade and a Cisco? And then repeat. Thanks,,,
BVienneau
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April 5th, 2016 12:00
Check with your Cisco vendor to see if you can give them an export of your Brocade configs and have them give you the zones to upload into the Ciscos. We've done it the other way around before. if you cannot pre-zone, then just zone as you have them connected and they are discovered in the Cisco. You could take the paths offline first by removing the HBA in "Fabric A" from each host first in the Compellent GUI and rescan the hosts. That'll help the hosts possibly freak out less, but I've replacements without doing any of that. VMware will of course want you to do it all in Maintenance Mode on the hosts...
jedijeff
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April 5th, 2016 13:00
I suppose I could just do port zoning to start with. Still this seems risky to me :(