FC Direct SAN access?

[mbeckey]

I was able to piece together the steps below by using some Forums posts, thanks for the information.

We have two HP blades (2008 R2 Std) running the proxy role both have access to the SAN at each site one in our production site and the other at our DR site.

I am trying to confirm that I am setting up the FC Direct SAN access correctly, below are the steps that I have taken so far at the DR site to test.

1. Disabled “Automount”
2. Mapped LUNS to the Proxy Server
3. Rescanned the disks on the Proxy and in Disk Management and the LUNS appeared offline.
4. Then on the Backup server I went to Infrastructure – Backup Proxies and changed the Transport mode for the DR proxy server “VMware Proxy – Transport mode – Direct SAN access and I also left “ Failover to network mode if primary transport mode fails **) selected.
5. Then on the Backup server I went to Infrastructure - Managed Servers – Microsoft Windows – and selected the proxy and selected Rescan.
6. Once that was done I changed the Target proxy on the replication job to point to the DR proxy server.

Questions: So before I do the production side I wanted to confirm that the steps above are correct?

Since the Proxy is a Windows server I am guessing that there is limit of the amount of data stores that we can present to each proxy server?

Since we have 53 production data stores and there are only 25 drive letters left we are sort of limited?

Is there a official setup guide on how to configure the FC Direct SAN access I have failed to see it in the User Guide?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Mark,

Yes, all steps are correct, but for one thing:

No need to use "automount" cmdlet, as it might cause issues unrelated to the backup process (for ex. I've seen issues with Windows updates when "automount" was set to disabled). On Windows Server 2008 you'd better use SAN policy setting instead. Сheck that the SAN policy is set to Offline Shared using diskpart and the "SAN" command.

Since we have 53 production data stores and there are only 25 drive letters left we are sort of limited?

Drive letters are not assigned to the LUNs you present to the Windows proxy, so you can mount all your 53 production datastores to this server.

Is there a official setup guide on how to configure the FC Direct SAN access I have failed to see it in the User Guide?

There is no official documentation, as the procedure is pretty straight forward for all types of SANs. See this topic for more info: VMware : [FAQ] FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Thank you!

[mbeckey]

Hey Vitaliy,

Thanks for the quick reply I just wanted to check to make sure there wasn't someting I was missing. We have decided since we are only doing Tier1 guests that we will create new data stores just for replication and move the guests to these data stores.