HP Insight Virtualization Manager with Logical Server Management 6.1 User Guide

Storage in a Virtual Connect environment
Storage in a VC environment is often housed within storage area networks (SANs), which are
accessed through FC connections. Using SAN storage has many advantages, including allowing
a system to seamlessly failover from one blade to another in the case of a failure.
Figure 6-2 SAN storage
The endpoints in a FC connection are called physical ports. Ports are uniquely identified using
assigned WWNs. This is similar to the way that MAC addresses uniquely identify Network
Interface Controllers (NICs). Server blades and SANs have ports in which they communicate
with the outside world. The general management of FC communication is handled through a
FC switch within the context of a fabric.
Administrator roles
The VC storage environment illustrated in Figure 6-2 often requires at least two administrator
roles:
• The server administrator (or system administrator) manages the enclosure and all blades
within it.
• The storage administrator manages the SAN and all defined storage volumes within the
SAN.
When requested by a server administrator, a storage administrator carves out volumes of a
specified size and type and provides access to these volumes. It is common to provide volume
access only to specific server side WWNs (FC ports), tightly controlling who can access the
volume within a highly shared environment. This process is called pre-presenting logical unit
numbers (LUNs). (Note that the LUN is specified during presentation, not the LUN UUID.)
Extending the administrator roles discussed above, responsibilities for managing logical servers
in ID-VSE are divided between the server administrator and the storage administrator.
• The server administrator is responsible for creating and managing logical servers, because
they represent servers with Virtual Connect.
• The storage administrator is responsible for creating and managing the storage used by
these logical servers.
Logical server storage
Insight Dynamics allows you to logically represent your storage environment in a logical server
storage configuration. A logical server completely defines your storage, including all Fibre
Channel ports, fabrics, server WWNs, storage WWNs, volumes, and LUNs.
70 Defining storage for logical servers