SAN Best Practices

Hi, I thought the community could use a discussion thread about SAN best practices.  These were provided by Jason Jasner as part of Sun/Oracle SAN training course, and I hope this information is also helpful to our customers.

• Use dual fabrics

Separate, redundant paths to storage provide resilience in case of component failures.

• Use unique Domain IDs, ALWAYS, one domain could be Even numbers and the other domain could Odd numbers
  
• Insist (Lock) Domain Ids

Unique and insistent Domain IDs make troubleshooting easier by helping to identify and isolate the issue.

• Single initiator (HBA) zoning whenever possible

HBA's like to 'chatter' when they are zoned together, often sharing RSCN's  ('state change notifications') when they see devices appear and disappear from the fabric.  This can make troubleshooting more difficult.