Configuring SAN and Creating VMs connected to SAN using NPIV on SLES10 SP2

Author: Suma B R

This article helps to create a npiv setup on SLES10 SP2 with XEN as hypervisor. This has been tried on Dell PowerEdge servers.

a) Configure VM Host to SAN

1. Retrieve the node name (wwnn) and port name (wwpn) from the server to be configured as below:

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1. Log on to SAN configuration center and configure a connection for the server by providing the node name and port name. Separate every two digits of node and port name with “:” Eg: If node name is 0x2000001B3212A6B5 and port name is 0x2100001B3212A6B5 then Initiator should be: 

   20:00:00:1B:32:12:A6:B5:21:00:00:1B:32:12:A6:B5

    

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1. Create a Virtual disk for the connection created in Step 2.

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b) Configure VM to SAN

Follow the same steps as Step a) Configure VM host to SAN.

Eg: 20:00:00:00:C9:77:DE:AD:20:00:00:00:C9:77:FA:CE

c) Create VMs Connected to SAN

1. Open VM manager, the command is virt-manager.
2. Select the desired OS time and move to the “Summary” page. Select the “Disks” section to add npiv storage disk.

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1. In the “Virtual Disk” page, for “Source” provide a link for the storage disk in the format, npiv:<san id>-<wwpn>-<wwnn>-<target id>-<lun>. 

   Eg. npiv:100000051e09e3da-20000000c977fbce-20000000c977dead-500601604ba00d11-0

    

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1. Continue the VM installation by providing the installation source and complete process.
2. After the installation, the vm file under /etc/xen/vm should look like the following:

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