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I have a PowerVault with 4 FC modules at 8gb/s. I don't want to jack the SAN into our 10/100/1000 switch because of the max 1gb/s speed.

My question is can I jack both ESXi host's FC into the SAN's FCs and have HV and vMotion?

Frank
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    Standard Fibre Channel (it's "Fibre" in FC, a proper name) uses a completely different medium from Ethernet. You can not plug the 8gbFC modules into your 1gbE switch. Perhaps you should read up on FC and become acquainted with the technology *before* planning or deploying anything. – Chris S Sep 21 '11 at 20:30
  • I don't want to plug it into my switch (which has 4 1000base FC ports). I was asking if I will have HV and vMotion if my 2 ESX host's 8gbFC where plugged into my 8gbFC SAN. – Frank Sep 21 '11 at 20:47
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    What's "HV"? Did you mean "HA"? – EEAA Sep 21 '11 at 21:10
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    @Frank, you're Ethernet Switch has Fibre Channel ports? I don't think so. The slowest FC AL or SW Switch is 1Gb, there's no such thing as a 10/100/1000 port in FC. Something's not making sense. – Chris S Sep 22 '11 at 01:55

2 Answers2

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The SAN itself doesn't need an Ethernet connection in this case, all it needs is FC to the ESXi hosts. The ESXi hosts will need GigE Ethernet. During VMotion, the source ESXi starts sending machine-state to the target ESXi host over the VMKernel connection in the virtual-switch. That's actually a connection between the two ESXi hosts over your physical Ethernet switch. Meanwhile, when state is fully transferred control of the VMDK files is passed over to the target server it it goes live. So, vMotion requires both FC and Ethernet.

HA (what I presume you meant by HV) requires vMotion to work, so should be available if vMotion is working.

Unless you meant Hardware Virtualization, or direct LUN presentation. That can also work, but is trickier. The same volume needs to be presented to both ESXi hosts using exactly the same LUN number, if it doesn't have the same LUN number that volume won't be visible when the VM is on one or the other ESXi host.

sysadmin1138
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As long as both your ESXi hosts can see the same shared storage, HA, vMotion, Storage vMotion, etc. should all work. It doesn't matter how these systems see the storage - you could have one host attached via FC and one via iSCSI. As long as they have consistent access to the same VMFS volume(s), you should have no problems.

EEAA
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