HP Integrity VM 4.3 N-Port ID Virtualization - A brief overview

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Virtual World Wide Name Management
Using GUID Manager to automatically allocate World Wide Names
HP recommends installing the GUID Manager product (GUIDMgr), and allowing it to handle WWNs for you
automatically. GUID Manager is available for download at www.software.hp.com (enter “GUIDMgr” in the search
box). The GUIDMgr provides a mechanism to manage unique WWNs so that the same ID is not re-allocated until
freed. This avoids the possibility of data corruption that arises when the same LUNs are presented to multiple VMs by
mistake. GUIDMgr is integrated with HP Integrity VM 4.3 January 2012 patch release such that once it is configured,
administrators may use the commands that they are familiar with (hpvmcreate and hpvmmodify) to interact with the
GUIDMgr automatically.
The GUIDMgr product relies on a client/server architecture, and one GUID database server (this is the same as the
GUIDMgr server) can support multiple hosts. It is also possible to have multiple GUIDMgr servers, but it is strongly
recommended that each GUID DB server be configured with its own subset of the WWN range that HP has reserved
for GUIDMgr use. Each server may manage up to 100 unique ranges of WWNs and each range of WWNs may
contain up to 32K entries.
Additionally, you should bear the following requirements in mind:
1. All WWNs on a single SAN must be unique.
2. All hosts in a “migration cluster” (a group of servers that VMs can migrate between) must be on the same SAN
and should use the same GUIDMgr server.
3. All GUIDMgr servers must be running HP-UX 11i v3 September 2008 update or later.
The range that HP has reserved for NPIV is 0x50014c2000000000 to 0x50014c27ffffffff for Port WWNs and
0x50014c2800000000 to 0x50014c2fffffffff for Node WWNs.
For more information about installing, configuring and using GUIDMgr, please see the HP-UX GUID Manager
Administrator Guide and the GUIDMgr man pages: guid_client_prepare(1M), guidconfig(1M), guidd(1M),
guiddbutil(1M), guidkeyd(1M), guidmerge(1M), guidmgmt(1M), and guidrecovery(1M).
Allocating IDs manually or with third-party products
When manually configuring vHBAs, vWWNs may safely be picked from the range 0x100000110a030000 to
0x100000110a030fff. This is a total of 4096 WWN, which are not in the range that is handled automatically by
GUIDMgr (see above). A user may use GUIDMgr for some NPIV HBAs and still manually select from the above range
for other vHBAs. If this is being done, please note that you can save your manual settings in the GUIDMgr for tracking
purposes, but the GUIDMgr never assigns a WWN outside the range that HP has reserved.