SAN Zoning configuration on Cisco UCS
Posted by craig 
- on March 13th, 2010 in Data Center, Hardware, Server, Storage, Tips | 2 Comments »
Recently I had deployed quite a number of EMC SAN with MDS Switches and Cisco UCS, I found tha FC SAN zoning might be a key consideration we may need to take a look for every deployment. This post will more focus on the MDS and UCS 6120 FC Uplink.
Cisco UCS interconnect fabric switches are utilizing FC uplink to allow the Cisco Unified Computing System to get access to the SAN fabric environment.
Here is the architecture diagram you can refer to. In order to make this work, 1st requirement will be the NPIV.
What is NPIV? ( N_Port ID Virtualization or NPIV is a Fibre Channel facility allowing multiple N_Port IDs to share a single physical N_Port)
For more details information, you can refer to the URL HERE
Once the NPIV had been enabled on the SAN Switch, you just need to enable the FC uplink from the Interconnect Fabric by the UCS Manager or CLI mode. Now you should able to see the WWN login from the command prompt, device manager or fabric manager. Any 1 of the method will work. To simplify the setup for the UCS, you can consider port base zoning or WWN zoning. I had done both setup before with VSAN in place, it looks similar to me except from security stand point. If we are only connecting host and storage via the SAN, the port base zoning with the Storage host group features should able to manage the host group to access the correct LUN. If there are additional devices such as tape library, this may create another layer of confusion. At the end, I configured all the zoning base on WWN id, which are still the best configuration in most environment today to prevent any device, host or target conflict in the fabric environment. Not to say the port base zoning will not work, it just the WWN base is more secure and reliable.
I had done the test with the port base zoning and end up, the backup device will be visible even from my ESX server which run on top of Cisco UCS. This is not cool 
Related posts:
- FCoE VLAN and FC Uplinks in Cisco UCS Architecture
- Simplify Setup and Configuration for Cisco UCS vs Traditional Blade
- Virtual KVM with Cisco UCS Manager
- New Version of Firmware release for Cisco UCS
- Memory Architecture of Cisco UCS
2 Responses
Craig,
Thanks very useful. I’ve been struggling with this for some time. How do you see the the WWN login: either via cli, device manger or fabric manager. Where exactly you do this? And also how do you mask it in Clarion (or any storage).
in MDS you can try this command, show flogi database, or show flogi fcns database
in Clariion, I created the host group and add the necessary host to access to the specify LUN. All the host WWN will be required to be registered in Navisphere from EMC.