HPE Storage Users Group

Hi all.

Is there any way to test/see that port persistence is set up correctly?

My environment is gen8 servers with 8gbit FC cards, HP 300 switches and a 3par 7200.

I checked the switches and they appear to have NPIV enabled on the ports. But I am not sure if I can check anything on the servers (vsphere 5.5) or the storage itself to see if Port persistence is up and running


Anyone know?

plug out a front end cable, fc or iscsi.
Your host will still see the 4 or 8 ports or your array.
Then have a look to IMC, port section and you will see your port has been failed over.

i would prefer not verifying it the physical way of yanking cables, but i suppose if thats the only solution i will have to go that way.

i had just hoped there was a way to see that the host had both WWNs presented, but alas?

Bot WWNs presented? Huh?

You can initiate a failover from cli as well. That would prevent the need for yanking cables.
Another option is to just shut a switchport to the 3par port.

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The goal is to achieve the best results by following the clients wishes. If they want to have a house build upside down standing on its chimney, it's up to you to figure out how do it, while still making it usable.

i mightve mistaken the concept, but i believed that port persistence is that both controllers present both their own address, and the one of the other node pair, so in case of a failover there hosts would not be able to tell that a failover had taken place.

I perhaps wrongly assumed it happend on the wwn or iqn level.

i will try and read the whitepaper on port persistence again

All ports present their own address, and as soon as a port fails, the peer port of the failed port will present the wwn of the failed port as well. So you'll only have two wwns on one port if the other one is down.

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The goal is to achieve the best results by following the clients wishes. If they want to have a house build upside down standing on its chimney, it's up to you to figure out how do it, while still making it usable.

To check if you've got it set up right if you look at the ports in the imc, then one of the right hand columns shows partner ports, and just check the wwpns are thenonesnyou expect the partners to be.

If those are filled in though, it's been set up right.

Thank you Davidkn.

I checked it (screenshot below), and it seems that they all have a partner, but that there is no NPIV ports configured.

Is that something i should look into, or is it only related to Peer Motion, and not Peer Persistence?

It all looks ok.

If you really want to be sure, run a checkhealth -svc on cli, it will report if there are issues with the port configuration, amongst a dozen other checks.

_________________
The goal is to achieve the best results by following the clients wishes. If they want to have a house build upside down standing on its chimney, it's up to you to figure out how do it, while still making it usable.

If it's a brocade switch from the past 5 or so years (maybe more) then npiv is enabled and supported by default anyway.

Screenshot looks good to me.