double disk drives showing up

[chuckcounty]

We are using an IBM shark - connected to 2109 fibre channel switches using Qlogic HBA's in NT servers. Sometimes we have double disk drives showing up. Someone here has said zoning may help but my limited knowledge of Zoning states it is used for security and performance purposes.

I have 2 questions - has anyone ever seen the double disk drive problem?

And am I correct in my thinking of zoning.

Thanks for your help - I am new to this.

 

[comtec17]

Are you using more than one HBA on your host?

Do you have the LUN(s) going down multiple director ports on the shark?

If you answer yes to any of these then you will to implement zoning. You should zone 1 director port on the shark to your HBA.

My AIM is comtec17 if you want to chat.

 

[gupel]

If you have two HBAs in the server, it is normal. Windows treats two pathes as two different drives. In this case use SDD driver from IBM.
If you have one HBA - try to find what the second drive is and use zonning on the switch and/or LUN masking on the shark.

 

[chuckcounty]

Thanks for the responses - I can understand seeing 2 drives with 2 HBA cards - and we are running SDD but it may not be set-up correctly. However, not sure how zoning would help eliminate the second drive showing up with one HBA.

To be honest we have 3 different folks involved - 1 guy knows only the shark, the other is a server guy who is configuring the HBA cards and me - I am a Ethernet guy who is now responsible for Fibre channel switches. When working it is just great - finding help when it does not work is tough.

 

[comtec17]

By creating a zone with the server HBA (1) and one Shark Director port only will only show you one path.

 

[chuckcounty]

problem was solved by directing the server on the shark out one port - we had an Arbitrated Loop on the fiber switch which was causing us problems. We could have created a zone as you guys said, however we were not sure if we needed to bring down all of the servers connected to the switch if we created a zone.

thanks for all of your help

 

[comtec17]

When you create a zone/configuration, the servers will not need to be brought down as long as you are sure you have the correct host and target setup.