NPIV Pitfalls

Recently, I was tasked with setting up NPIV in our VMware environment. While at first I thought this would be a breeze, I would soon learn that anytime I think something is going to be easy, I should think again.

My first challenge was, of course, the VMware upgrade. I had given myself the time over between Christmas and New Years to perform the upgrade as no one in my company seems to be around during that time. It’s much like a ghost town around here, just without the tumbleweeds. I had initially thought that the Virtual Center upgrade would be simple and the host OS upgrade would be difficult. It turned out to be completely opposite. However, the upgrade was performed successfully and with minimal hair loss on my part.

The next challenge I would face is coordinating the setup of the fiber switch to support NPIV. It was at that time I discovered that the IOS level of the fiber switch we use was not NPIV compatible. Since we had two new fiber switches with a current IOS level to support NPIV, we moved the VMware servers over to these. Of course I had to play Vmotion hop-scotch with my VM’s running on the host OS’s, but everything went well in this regard.

Now I was finally ready to get NPIV going. My path was clear and it was full steam ahead. I opened the configuration settings of my VM (which had the required RDM already) and setup my NPIV on it. I then went to our fiber switch admin and asked him to setup the zones. It was at this time that the path became blocked.. again.

Try as we might we couldn’t get it to see the new WWN generated by NPIV. And that’s when we made two discoveries. First, while NPIV was supported on those fiber switches, they had not bought the upgrade to have it enabled. Second, when the VMware servers were ordered (IBM 3950’s with 8 Dual Core Procs and 64 GB of RAM), the people doing the ordering had apparently ignored my request for 4Gb fiber HBA’s and instead ordered 2Gb HBA’s. And, sadly, 2Gb HBA’s do not support NPIV.

Ah, the frustration that can come with being in the information technology field.

So, here I sit with plan two. I’ve been given clearance to purchase the upgrade to the fiber switch. And as luck would have it we are going to be swapping out the VMware environment with newer models of the servers. Since I am completely in charge of this swap-out, the new servers will have the required 4Gb HBA’s.

Until that time we will be using NetApp’s snapdrive to connect through iSCSI to the necessary LUN’s. Since all of this was being done for convenience (in order to keep the scripts the same on the VM’s and the physical servers for attaching to LUN’s), I’m not to upset about it.

I just look at it as another journey down the road of IT and overall I learned a great deal about the entire process.