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Veritas Flex Appliance Getting Started and Administration Guide

Last Published: 2023-10-25

Product(s): Appliances (3.3, 3.2, 3.1, 3.0)

Platform: Flex Appliance OS

Assigning Fibre Channel ports to an instance

To perform backups over Fibre Channel, you must assign ports to your application instances.

This release supports the following types of backups over Fibre Channel:

VMware SAN transport (initiator)
Tape out (initiator)
SAN client (Fibre Transport target) - supported on NetBackup 9.1.0.1 and later instances

Use the following procedure to assign one or more Fibre Channel ports to an application instance.

To assign Fibre Channel ports to an instance

From the System topology page of the Flex Appliance Console, navigate to the Application instances section.
Locate the instance that you want to assign ports to. If it is running, select it and click Stop. You can also wait to stop the instance until the Flex Appliance Console prompts you to if you prefer.
Click on the instance name to open the instance details page, then navigate to the Fibre Channel tab.
Click Assign ports and follow the prompts to assign available ports. If you assign a port as an initiator that was previously used as a target, you are prompted to rescan the port before you can continue.
Note:
Depending on the use case you select for the port, only the devices of that storage type are visible to the instance. If you want all devices to be visible to the instance, select all available options from the Used for drop-down menu.

Port sharing and multipathing support

Note the following information:

You can assign an initiator port to multiple instances if the instances belong to the same tenant. You cannot assign a target port to multiple instances.
You can use the same port for both VMware and Tape out backups.
You can assign multiple ports to the same application instance or instances as long as they meet the following guidelines:
- Used for VMware SAN transport:
  Multiple ports can be assigned to a single or to multiple application instances in any combination.
- Used for Tape out or for both Tape out and VMware SAN transport:
  Multiple ports can be assigned to a single or to multiple application instances. However, the ports that are connected to the same tape devices must also be connected to the same application instances. The same tape devices cannot be assigned to different instances using different ports.
- Used for SAN client:
  Multiple ports can be assigned to a single or to multiple application instances in any combination. Once you have assigned the ports, you cannot assign them to additional application instances or use them for another use case unless you unassign the existing instances.
A Fibre Transport (FT) target port can handle data streams from multiple SAN client initiator ports concurrently. However, if you want it to handle streams from more than two SAN client initiator ports, consider changing the following NetBackup primary server setting:
nbftconfig -setconfig -ncp4
Caution:
This setting applies to all FT target ports on all media servers in your NetBackup domain. This setting should only be increased from the default (2) when all of the following conditions exist:
All FT target ports on all media servers are at least eight gBit/s link speeds.
The mix of jobs is such that all of the media servers have unused FT pipes.
A large number of jobs from other SAN clients are waiting for resources.
The back-end storage units have a lot of unused throughput capacity.
If you increase the -ncp setting too high, the load balancing between multiple FT media servers could become highly imbalanced.