On 8/15/06, Jerry Jelinek <Gerald.Jelinek at sun.com> wrote:
> Paul Kraus wrote:
> > What is the recommended way to manage SAN based storage across
> > mulitple servers and zones ? We are going to have more than 32 zones
> > on a set of servers that are sharing storage.
>
> I don't know much about SANs so my answer might not be very
> helpful. I work on zones and I used to work on SVM. My understanding
> is that you would use LUN masking and configure the SAN so that the host
> that needs to see the SAN storage can see it.
My understanding of SAN LUN masking matches yours (you
configure the SAN switches so that only the requires hosts can 'see'
the LUNs in question). Unfortunately, that does not fit well with what
we want to do (now, whether what we want to do is the best way to
achieve this is another question :-). We are setting up small clusters
of servers (right now two servers, but we expect to increase that to
four servers), we are not yet using SunCluster to manage this (but we
expect to in the future), but we want to be able to relatively easily
migrate a non-global zone from one server to another in the same
cluster.
Our current plan is to create a metaset for each non-global
zone, and all disk devices for that NG-zone would be part of that
metaset (and the only devices int hat metaset). This provides what we
need; namely 1) prevent a server from accessing a SAN LUN that it does
not currently own and 2) provide a mechnism to very easily migrate an
NG-zone's disk devices to another server. Unfortunately, a hard limit
of 32 metasets limits us to 32 NG-zones. We are currently using a pair
of T2000 in this configuration and we expect that we will have over 10
zones per server. With only two servers we are under the 32 limit, but
when we grow the 'cluster' to four servers we will be over the 32
limit.
So now that I have rambled on for far too long (just as I want
to understand what is going on, I try to provide enough information
for everyone else to undertsand the situation as well), I'll back up a
step and ask
"What is the best way to facilitate easily migrating groups of disk
devices between servers connected to a SAN ?"
--
Paul Kraus
