Zoning an ESXi to an XtremIO Storage Array

The task is relatively easy if you have some background on storage but I wanted to take note of it in this blog post as I don’t do this on a daily basis. Once you connect your ESXi to the storage array you don’t have much to do after that except on some cases when you need to change some advanced parameters like the HBA queue length or the PSP configuration.

The XtremIO is an enterprise 100% flash based array and I think that is the simplest one to use for provisioning storage.
So I’ll try to keep this short in a step by step style. What need to be done is to zone every ESXi host HBA to a different storage controller on the XtremIO. The two HBA port is physically attached two SAN switch (a Brocade DCX in this case).

This generic image represent the general idea

First I will save the zoning configuration in case I need to restore it

zoneobjectcopy current_config_dcx01, config_dcx01-11022017

Create an alias for the HBA port wwpn identifier

alicreate "esx001_hba0", "10:00:00:90:fc:fb:e1:e9"

Create a zone for the first HBA port to the first storage controller FC port

zonecreate "Z_esx001_hba0_xtremio_X1SC1FC1", "esx001_hba0;xtremio_X1SC1FC1" 

The X1SC1 here represent the X-Brick 1 and storage controller 1.

Create a zone for the first HBA port to the second storage controller FC port

zonecreate "Z_esx001_hba0_xtremio_X1SC2FC1", "esx001_hba0;xtremio_X1SC2FC1"

Add the two zone to the brocade switch configuration

cfgadd "current_config_dcx01", "Z_esx001_hba0_xtremio_X1SC1FC1"
cfgadd "current_config_dcx01", "Z_esx001_hba0_xtremio_X1SC2FC1"

Save and enable the configuration

cfgsave
cfgenable current_config_dcx01

You should do the same on the second brocade switch but this time using the second HBA port.

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