Reference Guide

28 Preparing Your Systems for Clustering
Installing the Fibre Channel HBA Drivers
For more information about installing and configuring HBAs, see the
following:
• Compellent HBAs—Compellent documentation that is included with
your HBA kit.
• Emulex HBAs—Emulex support at emulex.com or the Dell Support at
support.dell.com .
• QLogic HBAs—QLogic support at qlogic.com or Dell Support at
support.dell.com .
For more information about supported HBA controllers and drivers, see the
Dell Cluster Configuration Support Matrices at dell.com/ha.
Implementing Zoning on a Fibre Channel
Switched Fabric
A Fibre Channel switched fabric consists of one or more Fibre Channel switches
that provide high-speed connections between servers and storage devices. The
switches in a Fibre Channel fabric provide a connection through inbound and
outbound points from one device (sender) to another device or switch (receiver)
on the network. If the data is sent to another switch, the process repeats itself
until a connection is established between the sender and the receiver.
Fibre Channel switches provide you with the ability to set up barriers between
different devices and operating environments. These barriers create logical
fabric subsets with minimal software and hardware intervention. Similar to
subnets in the client/server network, logical fabric subsets divide a fabric into
similar groups of components, regardless of their proximity to one another.
The logical subsets that form these barriers are called zones.
Zoning automatically and transparently enforces access of information to the
zone devices. More than one PowerEdge cluster configuration can share the
Compellent Storage Center storage system in a switched fabric using Fibre
Channel switch zoning and LUN mapping with Compellent Storage Center
software. This configuration allows multiple clustered or nonclustered hosts
to share a storage system.
PowerEdge cluster configurations support both World Wide Name (WWN)
and port zoning.