Managing the appliance Fibre Channel ports
If your appliance has Fibre Channel ports, you can view and manage them from the Fibre Channel interfaces page on the Flex Appliance Console. To access the page, click the icon in the left-side navigation bar.
On this page, you can view all of the Fibre Channel ports on the appliance. Click on any port to see additional information, such as the WWPN, the remote port, and the devices that are connected to it. See Viewing the devices that are connected to the Fibre Channel ports.
Note:
The number of Fibre Channel ports on the appliance depends on your hardware configuration. For more information, see the Product Description for your specific hardware model.
This release supports the following types of backups over Fibre Channel:
VMware SAN transport (initiator)
Tape out (initiator)
SAN client (Fibre Transport target)
If you want to perform backups over Fibre Channel, you must assign ports to your application instances. To assign or unassign ports, navigate to the System topology page and click on the instance name, then navigate to the Fibre Channel tab.
See Assigning Fibre Channel ports to an instance.
See Unassigning Fibre Channel ports from an instance.
Cohesity recommends the following best practices for connecting Fibre Channel devices:
Flex Appliance 8.0 has been tested for up to 6,000 storage devices or paths in the case of multipathing. If you zone more than the tested number of devices or paths, you may have to take additional steps to perform the following operations and avoid the associated issues:
Initial configuration and Flex Appliance updates
These operations may take a long time or fail.
Factory reset
During a factory reset, the Veritas Remote Management Interface may go blank and may not accept input.
You should consult with Technical Support before you implement a Fibre Channel configuration of that size.
VMware SAN transport mode only works with VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) datastores version 6.0 or later. Other devices such as the raw device-mapping (RDM) format are not supported. Make sure that only VMFS devices are zoned to the appliance to avoid backup failures.
Refer to the NetBackup Software Compatibility List to confirm the supported VDDK versions.
Cohesity recommends that you do not allocate more than four ports to the same device unless the storage array requires it.
If you run VMware SAN backups to LSI storage, the LSI storage should be configured in Asymmetric Logical Access Unit (ALUA) mode by following the procedure from the storage vendor. The procedure may involve updating the storage array firmware to a version that supports ALUA mode. If the storage was connected before it was configured in ALUA mode, you also need to unmap and remap the LSI storage LUNs to the appliance.
After the LSI storage LUNs have been remapped, scan the associated Fibre Channel ports from the Fibre Channel interfaces page on the Flex Appliance Console.
After an appliance restart or an instance relocation, monitor the Fibre Channel interfaces page and wait for the link state of the ports to be up before you run any backups. The ports may take up to 10 minutes to become active.