The following sections provide examples of how to configure your SAN in a small environment.
Use a SAN with 16-port switches if your configuration requires only two SAN Volume Controller nodes. A typical configuration has two SAN Volume Controller nodes and up to four RAID controller pairs. With this configuration, the SAN Volume Controller nodes and RAID controllers use eight of the port switches and leave the remaining eight ports on the switch for host connections. You can also adjust the configuration to include more RAID controllers and less host connections. If you want to include an optional service node, you can attach the service node to one fibre-channel port on each of the switches.
Use a SAN with 32-port switches if your configuration requires more than two SAN Volume Controller nodes. An example configuration for a large SAN Volume Controller based SAN uses a dual switch, redundant SAN fabric and four SAN Volume Controller nodes. The SAN Volume Controller nodes use 16 of the ports and the remaining 16 ports are used for RAID controllers and host connections.