•Only manageable fabrics will be displayed in the Path Provisioning. If no provisioning can be done on the fabric (any vendor) means it will not be displayed in Path Provisioning, but will be displayed in Provisioning Manager.

•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.

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, <job information>, cause: CIM_ERR_FAILED

Fabric Session is Locked: SessionState = 2

Try again later

Click Refresh 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).

•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).

•A set of tasks of the same type (such as mapping multiple LUNs).

•Multiple LUN masking tasks or a job consisting of several tasks of different types (such as, Map LUN, zone required ports, mask LUN) that go together as a combination).

•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. A job with all its required details (such as, parameters to invoke Provider Service methods) is stored in a job queue. At the scheduled time, the scheduler retrieves the job from the job queue and performs the tasks of the job, using the details stored in the job.

HP Storage Essentials SRM 6.0 User Guide 597