Dear Team,

Could you please assist me to solve the Riddle Of SAN Connection Between FS7300 and CISCO MDS SAN switch

In short, I am building a POC setup at customer site that includes a FlashSystem 7300 v.9.1.0, production SAN built at CISCO/vsan and couple of ESXi servers. MDS version is 6.2(9a).
In short, storage can see the host candidates but all its pathes are blocked/offline.
I am stuck on basic operation that worked fine for many other vendor's storage and kindly asking for assistance.

Now here comes some details. 

1. All the hosts are zoned to FS7300 host ports. By checking active memebers at the SAN switch I can confirm that all the initiator WWNs and FS's port WWNs are zoned correctly and active.
   
   
2. host candidated at storage side are reported correctly. I can see the host names, OS version, and initiators. But its status are offline.

checking more details for host candidate i found that there are some pathes from host to storage, but they are in "blocked" state. (hosts at screens below are from different hosts but situation is all the same)

3. Based on this data i started to check port starts for 7300, HBA1 port1. I found same state for all the host ports
from the GUI i can see that hosts are logged in to the controllers' port  ...1011... that has "host IO permitted" value "NO".

there also "virtualized" ports with SCSI protocol (...1015...) but i cannot see those WWNs at SAN fabric switches so i cannot zone it to servers. When I try manually add ...1015... wwpn into existing host zones, those wwpns are reported as not active, so hosts still has no connectivity even after HBA SAN rescan.

Moreover, if i check "lsportfc" command by storage CLI, there are no ...1015 nor ...1019 wwpns at all. There are ports 1..4 for both HBAs at controller 1 and 2, but no "virtual" ports reported.

All those ports were tested by direct connection from ESX server and proved functional. Traffic was run from 7300 to guest VM as expected by all the ports.

And now here comes the Questions.

Q1 - do I understand, the correct way to connect hosts to storage is zone it to virtual ports instead of "real" ones?
Q2 - whether is possible to enable host IO to the "real" ports like 1011..1024? I found no option in GUI?
Q3 - how to force "virtual" ports to appear at the SAN side? at moment, SAN admin cannot see it so we cannot do a zone change
Q4 - maybe there's a configuration guide/cookbook on how to configure Cisco MDS switches to work together with FlashSystem?

I would be grateful for any clues how to marry 7300 and servers through the Cisco FC SAN

Thank you in advance
    Serge K

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Nezih Boyacioglu
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Hi Nezih,

I have a follow-up question regarding your answer to number 1. Does this mean that if I plan to replicate the FS7300 to another FS7300 using a SAN switch, I should zone the physical WWPNs instead of the virtual SCSI WWPNs?

Hello John,

the NPIV WWPNs are acting only as Targets and NOT as Initiators.

Therefor you can not use the virtual WWPNs to create a replication partnership between the FS7300 systems.

Yes, you have to use the "physical" WWPNs.

Hi,

4.
The MDS9000 Interfaces Configuration Guide may help you for configuring N Port Virtualization on the MDS.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/dcn/mds9000/sw/9x/configuration/interfaces/cisco-mds-9000-nx-os-interfaces-configuration-guide-9x/configuring_npv.html

Best regards, Eiichiro

Many thanks to expert's replies above

based on those, i managed to complete setup successfully

the issue was at SAN side. after SAN admin completed seup, storage commissioning was performed as expected.

Best regards,
    Serge K 

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Serge Kurskov
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