Our storage fabric is a pair of HP branded Brocade fiber chanel switches (StorageWorks 8/80) set up in a redundant topology. Our HP EVA arrays have 2 redundant controllers - each with 2 redundant storage ports....so each EVA controller has 1 connection to each fiber channel switch.
I'm looking for best practice for physically connecting the 8-fiber channel Nexus 5000 ports to our SAN fabric. My assumtion is that each Nexus 5000 will have 4 ports going to each SAN switch like here:
Nexus5000-A-port1 ------ SANSwitch-A
Nexus5000-A-port2 ------ SANSwitch-A
Nexus5000-A-port3 ------ SANSwitch-A
Nexus5000-A-port4 ------ SANSwitch-A
Nexus5000-A-port5 ------ SANSwitch-B
Nexus5000-A-port6 ------ SANSwitch-B
Nexus5000-A-port7 ------ SANSwitch-B
Nexus5000-A-port8 ------ SANSwitch-B
NOTE: Then the same for Nexus5000-B
Questions:
(1) Is this the best way to physically connect the cables (i.e alternative options might be odd ports to SanSwitch-A and even to SanSwitch-B etc.). My concerns would be if certain Nexus ports shared some underlying circuitry between some port sets. If so, I'd want to split those up.
(2) Same question for the fiber switch side. Is there a benefit to connect to a bank of ports or to spread them out across several banks (i.e. the Storageworks switches have ports in banks of 8 (0-8), (9-15),(16-23), etc.)
(3) Again from the SAN fabric side, are there any best practice or documentation regarding proper zoning for the Nexus 5000 ports. I had planned to create a seperate zone for each Nexus 5000 port....each zone will contain the Nexus port alias and all EVA array storage ports aliases.
