SAN interview question and answers

Below are some of the frequently asked Storage (SAN) basic interview question and answers. Check the Storage Area Networks (SAN) basic & advanced concepts page in this site to learn more SAN basics. 

Storage Area Networks (SAN) Basic concepts Interview Questions and Answers


1. What is zoning?
A: Zoning is the allocation of resources for device load balancing and for selectively allowing access to data only to certain users.

2. How we can create the zoning?
A: 
1. Identify the WWPNs for the new server HBA. We can do this using Qlogic SAN Surfer or Emulex HBAnywhere,
2. create a new alias for the server HBA port cabled to that fabric.
For each storage device that the server needs access to on fabric 1 (or possibly just switch 1), create a new zone and include the new server alias and the alias for every relevant storage port on that device. Repeat if you have other storage devices (so two XIVs means two new zones).
3. Put the new zone (or zones) into the active zone set (or a clone of it) and activate it.
4. Repeat on fabric 2.

3. What is WWNN?
A: World Wide Node Name, it is 64 bit address. It is for identify the particular HBA

4. What is WWPN?
A: World Wide Port Number: It is 64 bit address; it is for port in HBA, Every port having their own WWPN.

5. What is the difference between WWNN and WWPN?
A: World Wide Node Name, it is 64 bit address. It is for identify the particular HBA
World Wide Port Number: It is 64 bit address; it is for port in HBA, Every port having their own WWPN

6. Expain synchronus, Asynchronous?
Asynchronous: A synchronous process is invoked by a request/response operation, and the result of the process is returned to the caller immediately via this operation.
Synchronous: An asynchronous process is invoked by a one-way operation and the result and any faults are returned by invoking other one-way operations. The process result is returned to the caller via a callback operation

7. New host and storage is there for that zoning also existing. What you will do in storage and how u will check whether the zoning is existing or not?
A: Physical Connectivity, Logical connectivity (zoning), Storage mapping to particular host

8. Explain about fabric services?
A: F-LOGI, P-LOGI, PR-LOGI

9. Explain zones and Zoneset?
A: ZONES: Zones can be members of different zone sets for different purposes
Zoneset: a zone set is composed of zones, which are composed of members

10. Fabric ports?
A: The fabric port (F_port) is a fabric switch port used to connect an N_port to a switch in a fiber channel topology.


11. What is Switch configuration?
A: connect switch through DB-9(Console port) port to management host run tip hard ware for windows host. 
There goto setup - ipaddrset - give IP address, Gateway, Subnet mask and finally enable the switch.

12. Expain about well known addresses (FLOGI,PLOGI)
i.FLOGI(Fabric logi):- It is the type of service when ever host connect to the Fabric ,Fabric will assign ID to the host.
ii.PLOGI(Port Logi):- It is the type of service where storage can assign a lun to hosts without access permissions.

13. How to check the status of the Switch ?
Checking the status of switch

14. What is meant by port channeling?
Ans;-Channeling is where you "bond" two different physical ports together into a single connection for higher bandwidth and redundancy

15. What is SCN?
State change notification used to find hardware failures .

16. What is truncking?
Ans:-Aggregation of ISL’s is tunneling these entire process will call it as trunking.8 ISL link’s aggregation is called truncking .To increase bandwidth,speed.

17. What is Easy tiering and how it works?
Answers : For improving IOPS we can use the easy tiering. It have four steps how it works
  • I/O Monitoring
  • Data placement advisor
  • Data migration planner
  • Data Migrator
  • In this concept max 2 TB of data can be migrated to the HDD’s to SSD’s
18. Step by step Zoning ?
Ans:-
i)  Alias creation
ii) Zone creation
iii) Cfg create
iv) Cfgsave
v) Cfgenable

19. How will you check storage us pinging with host are not?
Check in the storage array the mapped LUN’s are listing the host WWPN’s or not

20. Which zoning is secured ?
ANS:- Soft zoning is better and Flexible .it is done with WWN’s. When ever port failures connect to another port no need to do zoning again because wwn is unique for HBA.

21. What is storage portioning?
ANS :- It’s a logical entity consisting of one more logical drives that are shared by a group of hosts or exclusively accessed by a single host.

22. What is infiband switch bandwidth?
Ans:-InfiniBand is a switched fabric computer network communications link used in high-performance computing and enterprise data centers.


23. What is SCSI maping? SCSI masking?
Ans:-- Allocating lun to a perticular host without accessin permissions. Providing access rights to access lun to a particular host.

24. Firmware update in Brocade Switch ?
A: Firmware file download from server and update on switch

25. FC layers?
FC-4 :- ULP(upper layered Protocol) ex: fcp,fcip,icfcp
FC-3 :- Common services
FC-2 :- framing & flowcontrol
FC-1 ; - 8/10 Encoding & Decoding
FC-0 :- Physical layer Speeds and feeds)

26. FC topologies?
i) point-point
ii) FC_AL (Fiber channel – Arbitrated loop)
iii) Switched Fabric

27. What is frame ?
Ans:- Frame is a binary electrical digital data transfer between source and destination.frame size is 2148 bytes.

28. What is Priniciple switch?
Ans :-The switch which is having least domain ID in a fabric is Principal switch.

29. Before shutdown switch that what will you do?
A:Take config save ,if we want config upload.

30. What is SAN ?
Ans :-SAN is high speed networking technology used to connect host to the storage with fiber channel.

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