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How path provisioning works – HP Storage Essentials NAS Manager Software User Manual

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Storage Essentials 5.1 User Guide 423

You can view zones, zone sets and zone aliases on a Cisco switch; however, you cannot use the

management server to create, modify or remove them from a Cisco switch.

Path Provisioning looks for the names of the active zone set and of the active zones and all of

their saved counterparts in the zoning library in EFC Manager. The provisioning job only occurs

if those names match.

Keep in mind the following for Brocade switches:
While configuring Path Provisioning for a Brocade switch, you might occasionally see the following

message in the Message Console tab:

Failed Path Provisioning Job, , cause: CIM_ERR_FAILED

Fabric Session is Locked: SessionState = 2

Try again later

Click the Refresh button to see the final status. This message generally means that the Brocade

fabric is busy and the management server was unable to complete the operation. Try the operation

again at a later time.

How Path Provisioning Works

When you select a storage system in Path Provisioning, the management server displays all the

information relevant for provisioning with respect to the storage system selected. This information

includes:

Mapped, unmapped and unmasked (mapped to one or more storage system ports but not

associated to any host initiator port) volumes of the storage system,

Already masked LUNs of the storage system and the front end ports of the storage system

(possible candidates for LUN mapping step)

Hosts that are reachable (hosts belonging to the same fabric as the storage system) along with

their HBA and host initiator ports. Single multipathing functionality is supported.

Existing zones to which the ports of the storage system belong are displayed. If the Host and the

Storage System belong to multiple fabrics, zones of all those fabrics are displayed.

The above information is displayed in several different panes (storage system, host, volume, LUN

and zone panes). You can select relevant information from each of these panes (such as, which

volumes to be used for the LUN Mapping Task). Each of these selections potentially can create a

provisioning task to be performed. You can create a job that contains one of the following:

A single task of one type (such as, Map LUN)

Set of tasks of the same type (such as, multiple LUN Mapping)

Multiple LUN Masking tasks or a job consisting of several tasks of different types (such as, Map

LUN, zone required ports, mask LUN, which go together as a combination).

You can also create multiple jobs each consisting of multiple tasks of different types.

The jobs can be executed immediately or can be scheduled to start at a later time. Jobs with all its

required details (such as, parameters to invoke Provider Service methods) are stored in a job queue.

The scheduler, at the scheduled time, retrieves the job from the job queue and performs the tasks of

the job using the details stored in the job.