Managing a SAN without agents

You can manage a SAN when there are no agents.

About this task

In the following situations, there might not be any agents on the SAN:
  • The hosts do not currently have a Storage Resource agent or Fabric agent installed.
  • The host operating system is not supported by the Storage Resource agent or Fabric agent.
  • The customer requirements do not require the deployment of a Storage Resource agent or Fabric agent.

In these cases, it is recommended that an agent is installed on the Device server itself. This action allows the Device server to use advanced features like Remote Node Identification, which requires an agent.

Normally the Device server does not have a Fibre Channel host bus adapter. In this configuration, the following steps are taken:
  1. A Fibre Channel host bus adapter is added to the manager.
  2. An agent is installed on the Device server (the Device server is installed first).
  3. All storage devices are verified to ensure that they use LUN masking techniques. The LUN masking techniques prevent the Device server from accessing the disks used by the host systems.
  4. The Fibre Channel host bus adapter is attached to the SAN to be managed. This host is added to each zone that is intended to be managed by the Device server.