42 Preparing Your Systems for Clustering
Installing the Fibre Channel HBAs
For du al-HBA configurations, it is recommended that you install the Fibre
Channel HBAs on separate peripheral component interconnect (PCI) buses.
Placing the adapters on separate buses improves availability and performance.
For more information about your system's PCI bus configuration and
supported HBAs, see the Dell Cluster Configuration Support Matrix on the
Dell High Availability website at www.dell.com/ha.

Installing the Fibre Channel HBA Drivers

For more information, see the EMC documentation that is included with
your HBA kit.
For more information about installing and configuring Emulex HBAs and
EMC-approved drivers, see the Emulex support website located at
www.emulex.com or the Dell Support website at support.dell.com.
For more information about installing and configuring QLogic HBAs and
EMC-approved drivers, see the QLogic support website at www.qlogic.com or
the Dell Support website at support.dell.com.
For more information about supported HBA controllers and drivers, see the
Dell Cluster Configuration Support Matrix on the Dell High Availability
website at www.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.