port groups (one vs many)

why create individual ports group for each host, if they contain the same FA ports ?

The problem now is that you cannot change this online, You will have to delete the view first before changing the port group. What pete2c and dynamox suggested is absolutely correct but changing this online is impossible!

My suggestions is to leave this as it is for now. Make sure you consider this issue for your future provisioning.

I have seen many customer are doing this for correct naming of the masking views and their corresponding PGs but in your case since all the IGs are from ESX initiators so making a single PG would make a sense.

Hope it helps

Mohammed Salem  @yankoora

Yeah, I've recently discovered that we've in the past present two FA ports to each host, the problem is, each port is from the same director .  So since I'm going to have to resolve that, I'm going to clean things up.

I guess that was my question, inherited environment, muddling my way through a few things.

I won't recommend doing this however, . If it is a must, then you do that on a host by host basis, So shutdown the first ESXi host, delete the view, delete the old port group, create a new view with the new PG then bring your server up again. You will have to do this plan for each of your servers. I won't recommend making your hosts "Enter Maintenance mode" I will prefer a complete shutdown.

Hope it helps

Mohammed Salem @yankoora

Agree, I need to change the boot lun targets as well on the HBA so I need to reboot.

If you put all of ESX into a config style where they use single containers (PG, or IG or MV) and the cluster continues to grow, you get to the point where the ESX cluster activity is over-running the FA's with i/o (I'm there now).   With the pre-mentioned config there isn't a non-disruptive way to move work for a cluster member host to a new FA.   If you approach your structure where each host has a unique set of container names (MV/IG/PG) but a common SG, you now have a non-disruptive way to move/spread traffic to new FA's.

Al Barth wrote:    If you approach your structure where each host has a unique set of container names (MV/IG/PG) but a common SG, you now have a non-disruptive way to move/spread traffic to new FA's.

are you saying you have a dedicated set of FA ports per ESX host ?

We have had some clusters where each member utilizes different FA ports.