How to migrate to new san switches

[bbroeders]

Hi all,

we have at a remote site 2 DS24M2 switches each being a seperate fabric and connected over nishan 1620's to other site's with other fabrics.
We want to replace the DS24M2 switches at the remote site with ED140M switches.
The ED140's will fully replace the DS24M2 so all local storage and hosts including the connections to the nishan 1620's will go to these new switches.
As this is in a live environment we want to do this with the least outage and risk possible.

I'm now looking for whitepapers or other work instructions on how to do this.

Any good advise or documentation on this would be very welcome.
(I already searched emc's powerlink, but not found much yet)

 

[jjjon]

Are you using WWID zoning and are all hosts connected to both the fabrics?
You could introduce the new switches into the 2 fabrics with an ISL - this would update the new switch with the zoning info (config first with Domain/IP/etc). Then, assuming all your hosts are dual connected, use Powerpath to 'Standby' one of the paths and move to the new switch, then enable load balancing again on Powerpath (don't need to do this really, but stops errors being reported). When all hosts are moved over move the connection(s) to the storage associated with the paths moved. Do the same for the other fabric, and then remove your old switches.
If you use Port Zoning rather than WWID zoning, you'll have to update the zoning as you go along, and of course, if you have singly attached hosts, they'll require an outage.

J

 

[bbroeders]

jjjon,

Yes we do wwid zoning and hosts are connected to both zones.
But to save on initiators we zoned one SP per fabric for hosts so some outage will still happen.
I was wondering, do we have to make the new switch principal before powering down the DS24M2 or after or will it become principal automatically ?