SAN Transport on Dell Equalogic / SAN

[Neil_Natic]

I have two SAN environments (HP lefthand and Dell Equalogic).  The HP allows us to present a LUN to one server as read only while still allowing read / write access to another server but the Dell does not appear to do so.

How do you typically manage these LUNs to be SURE that no one goes in and mounts these "drives" in windows and destroys your VM infrastructure?  Do you know of another way other than to set the drives as read only on the backup server?

What if the backup server did mount these drives - how would you restore the VM servers?  Would you just be able to create a new LUN and somehow get the data to the new LUN and present to to VMware or would you literally have to do VMDK restores to the Vcenter server on the new LUN?

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

Hi Neil

You need to check out the TN below (if you haven't already) to see how SAN Transport needs to be configured:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH155831

Only other thing I can suggest is to create a logon message that states clearly that any uninitialised disks are not to be initialized to prevent them from being overwritten. Or lock down your backup server completely.

Thanks!

[Neil_Natic]

thanks craig.  I did exactly what is in that article.  Just freaks me out that the Dell doesnt have read only like the HP does.  

[CraigV]

EMC also have the ability to lock a LUN on some of their arrays from what I have seen.

That's obviously a limitation with Dell...