About HBAs for SAN clients and Fibre Transport media servers

The Fibre Channel host bus adapter (HBA) and driver requirements differ on the SAN clients and on the NetBackup FT media servers, as follows:

HBAs on SAN clients

The HBAs on the SAN clients can be any supported Fibre Channel HBA. The HBA ports must operate in the default initiator mode.

For the HBAs on the SAN client systems, do the following:

Install the drivers for the HBA.
Install the utilities for the HBA. Although not required for NetBackup operation, the utilities may help to troubleshoot connectivity problems.

HBAs on NetBackup FT media servers

The NetBackup media servers that host Fibre Transport require the following:

For the connections to the SAN clients, use a QLogic HBA that NetBackup supports for Fibre Transport. For these HBAs, you must configure them to use the NetBackup target mode driver.
See About nbhba mode and the ql2300_stub driver.
If you use SAN attached storage, you can use any supported Fibre Channel HBA to connect to the storage. For these HBAs, you should install the QLogic driver and utilities. The HBA ports that connect to the storage must remain in the default initiator mode.
The HBAs and their drivers must support 256K size buffers for data transfer.

Note:

To enable the SAN client 16-GB target mode driver support for HBA ports, you must create zones with only one initiator and keep only one target mode per zone. Each NetBackup client can have a zone with only one Fibre Transport media server.

For information about supported HBAs, see the Hardware Compatibility List at the following URL:

http://www.netbackup.com/compatibility

More Information

Preparing the SAN

About HBAs for SAN clients and Fibre Transport media servers

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