Deployment Guide

50 Dell Networking FC Flex IOM: Deployment of FCoE with Dell FC Flex IOM, Brocade FC switches,
and Dell Compellent Storage Array
Deployment/Configuration Guide
another port. Although a virtual disk can still only be written to from the controller that owns the disk,
virtual ports allow for better performance in terms of failover as the virtual connection can simply be
moved to another physical port in the same fault domain. To use virtual ports, all FC switches and HBAs
must support N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV). See the “Dell Compellent Storage Center Microsoft
Multipath IO (MPIO) Best Practices Guide” for more information on multipathing with Microsoft
Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise.
4.4 Brocade 6505 FC Switch Configuration
Note, the Brocade 6505 FC switch has not been configured yet and connectivity from the server to the
Compellent Storage Array is good. The reason for this is because, by default, the Brocade FC switch
allows all devices to see and communicate with each other. However, this is not best practice.
Access control on a switched SAN fabric can be provided by the fabric itself via zoning. By creating
zones, the fabric can be partitioned so that only specific devices can see and talk to each other. This is
somewhat analogous to VLANs on a LAN. However, unlike VLANs, zones typically consist of very few
devices such as one initiator and a few targets.
Best practice for zoning is to create a separate zone for each path that the host can see. This minimizes
external chatter and when something changes all nodes won’t be notified of the change. If there are
few nodes connected and to minimize configuration and maintenance, some may prefer to group
multiple WWPNs going to the same destination within one zone. Below, one zone is created for the
FCoE port going to all four ports of the storage. Note the World Wide Port Number (WWPN) of the end
node ports are used in the zoning configuration. We also could have created four zones – one per
FCoE port and storage port combination.
The two FC switches being used are Brocade 6505s and the zoning configurations are below. The
WWPNs starting with 20 are the virtual FCoE port WWPNs and the other WWPNs are for the Compellent
storage array. In this example, the WWPN of the CNA virtual FCoE port is being utilized. When working
with network adaptors that provide a MAC address as well as a World Wide Port and Node name, it’s
important to understand where these addresses originate. The M1000e chassis has a feature called
Flexaddressing which allows for a virtual MAC address/WWPN to be linked to a server, therefore, if the
CNA/adapter is changed later, zoning or configuration on switches does not need to be modified. For
more information on this feature and how to implement it see Section 6 “M1000e FlexAddress
enablement” of this document.