352-001 · Question #163
You work for a large company that has just acquired another smaller company. You have been asked to lead a group of SAN experts from both companies to design the integration plan that will be used to
The correct answer is C. Use IVR NAT with a transit VSAN between the SANs.. IVR NAT with a transit VSAN allows two Fibre Channel SANs with conflicting domain IDs to be interconnected without reconfiguring either fabric, minimizing disruption.
Question
You work for a large company that has just acquired another smaller company. You have been asked to lead a group of SAN experts from both companies to design the integration plan that will be used to interconnect the SANs and migrate the data from the newly acquired company to the main storage arrays. The first thing that the team discovers is that the two SANs have the same domain IDs. As the SAN team lead, what would you advise your team to do so that you can interconnect the two SANs while minimizing disruption?
Options
- AUse FCIP with Write Acceleration and IVR version 1 with a transit VSAN to expedite the data transfer
- BChange the domain IDs on both SANs so that they are both unique and then connect ISLs between
- CUse IVR NAT with a transit VSAN between the SANs.
- DThe two SANs cannot be merged without disruption.
How the community answered
(29 responses)- A10% (3)
- B14% (4)
- C45% (13)
- D31% (9)
Why each option
IVR NAT with a transit VSAN allows two Fibre Channel SANs with conflicting domain IDs to be interconnected without reconfiguring either fabric, minimizing disruption.
FCIP with Write Acceleration is designed for extending SANs over IP WANs for remote replication scenarios, and IVR version 1 does not support domain ID NAT, making this combination unable to resolve the overlapping domain ID conflict without disruption.
Changing domain IDs on both SANs requires reconfiguring the principal switch elections and performing fabric restarts on both environments, which introduces significant disruption to storage access for all hosts connected to either fabric.
IVR (Inter-VSAN Routing) NAT translates overlapping Fibre Channel domain IDs transparently using a transit VSAN as an intermediary, enabling devices in each fabric to communicate without requiring domain ID changes or fabric restarts on either SAN. This feature was specifically designed to solve the overlapping domain ID problem when interconnecting independently managed Fibre Channel fabrics.
The two SANs can in fact be interconnected with minimal disruption by using IVR NAT, which is the Cisco-recommended solution specifically for bridging fabrics with duplicate domain IDs.
Concept tested: IVR NAT for interconnecting SANs with duplicate Fibre Channel domain IDs
Source: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/mds9000/sw/8_x/configuration/ivr_configuration/cisco_mds9000_ivr_config_guide_8x.html
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