Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI/aSV)

Sangfor HCI and aSV provide a unified infrastructure combining compute, storage, networking, and built-in security to simplify deployment, operations, and services.
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6.11.1R1
Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI/aSV) {{ breadTitle }} User Manual Storage Configuration Guide Other Storage Configuration Guide Adding FC Storage
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Adding FC Storage

{{ $t('productDocDetail.updateTime') }}: 2026-01-05

Description

HCI supports adding FC storage as external storage, allowing the datastore of virtual machines to be placed on FC storage. FC storage is used as external shared storage, and virtual machines whose datastore is in shared storage can implement the HA function.

Precautions

  1. When adding FC storage to HCI, the volume will be formatted. Before adding, please confirm that other nodes do not use the volume.
  2. If the FC storage has been added before, it will prompt whether to restore the virtual machine on the FC storage.
  3. It is recommended that the hosts be configured with two HBA cards, each HBA card is configured with a fiber optical module, and the single-link bandwidth is more than 6GE.
  4. Not allowed to use external storage that does not support ATS to run production business (verify whether the storage supports the VAAI interface). The external storage needs to support sharing (multiple hosts can access at the same time) and support VAAI features (mainly referring to ATS attributes).
  5. It is forbidden to shrink the external storage used by HCI.
  6. It is prohibited to use thin provisioning/dynamic allocation for disk overcommitment on the external storage used by HCI.
  7. Before adding FC external storage, you need to click Scan for New Disk and then click New.
  8. If Atomic Test and Set (ATS) is not supported, the multipath policy supports only the primary-secondary mode.

Prerequisites

  1. There is an HBA card on the HCI node, which can be connected to the switch of the FC storage.
  2. The FC storage and switches must be properly configured to map the corresponding volumes to the HCI node.
  1. The storage must support hardware acceleration or ATS. Otherwise, it cannot be added to HCI. If ATS is not supported, contact Sangfor technical support for a service pack.

• To check whether ATS is supported, run the following command. If "good" is not returned, ATS is not supported.

sg_raw -s 1024 -i /dev/zero /dev/mapper/3664489f0fe6145f0b2f409926658f7ef 89 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00

• After HCI is upgraded to 6.9.0 or later, if a host in the HCI cluster is not restarted, the file system to which the cluster is mounted remains in the source version, and the compare and write operations are performed in SCSI-2 mode.

Steps

  1. Insert the HBA card into the HCI node and connect it to the FC storage directly through optical fiber or an FC switch.
  2. First, check whether the HCI can recognize the HBA card normally. You can select the node in Nodes and enter the Summary page of the relevant node to check the status of the HBA card.
  3. Make proper configurations on FC storage and fiber switches, then map the corresponding volumes to all nodes in the HCI cluster.
  4. Navigate to Storage > Other Datastore, click New and select FC Storage to add FC storage.

  1. Select FC storage and add disks. After adding, you need to configure the accessible nodes as all current nodes in the cluster.