Hello!
I'm looking to implement a FAS2020 device as shared storage for three Citrix Xenserver hosts. My past experience with storage has always been Fibre Channel, and I already have in place a small "infrastructure" for that - two separate fabrics each consisting of a HP 4/8 Base SAN Switch, some dual-HBA servers with one HBA connected to each switch and an HP MSA1500 dual-controller storage array with one controller connected to each switch.
My initial thought was to connect the FAS2020 to the same FC switches in the same manner, but having surfed around a bit I saw a lot of talk about why NFS might be a better solution. I'm almost sold on it, but I have no experience with NFS and Netapp, and I can't quite figure out how I would achieve similar high availability (no single point of failure) with NFS as I now have with FC.
So far I have thought the following:
First of course I must have a FAS with two heads (active/active). Then I should probably have two dedicated Ethernet switches. Each head of the FAS should be connected to both switches. Each server needing access to the storage should also be connected to both switches.
But I can't find any clear documentation about what to do next. How to configure the NetApp so that in case of one controller or one network switch failing the hosts would maintain access to storage?
I've read TR-3732 which talks about creating dynamic multimode VIF and using LACP, but this sounds like using a single network switch (=single point of failure). Is there any documentation describing the setup I'm thinking about, or am I way off course here?