Misconfigured zoning and had to bounce ports, can someone explain?

Question

I am working in a lab, and had the following configuration:
HOST1-PORT1 connected to MDS1 in VSAN10
HOST2-PORT1 connected to MDS2 in VSAN 20
DISK1-PORT2 connected to MDS2 in VSAN10
DISK2-PORT2 connected to MDS1 in VSAN 20
MDS1 and MDS2 were connected via a FCIP tunnel.
I could see everything as expected in the fcns database. What I wanted to do was have HOST1 use DISK1 from over the FCIP tunnel and HOST2 use DISK2 over the FCIP tunnel.
What I accidently did, was zone as follows:
Zone10
HOST1 DISK1
Zone20
HOST2 DISK1
From HOST1 I could not see DISK1 (windows disk manager), I could see it from HOST2 however, was able to format it and work with it. Once I figured out that I had zoned that drive to two hosts, I immediately went to correct it. And by the way, Sansurfer on HOST1 did show it saw the drive, but windows disk tools did not see it.
So on the MDS, I removed the incorrect pwwn, added the correct one, and activated the zoneset. Still HOST1 could not see the drive. HOST2 however could now see its new (corrected) drive. HOST2's sansurfer topology map was actually still showing both PWWN's, not sure if that was just cached or not as the DISK1 was no longer zoned to it.
So I reboot each HOST. Still no go, HOST1 could not see the DISK1! BTW, I checked the active zoneset and MDS reported all members correct and visible. So then I bounced each VSAN......honestly because I wasn't sure what else to do, and that still did not fix the issue, I tried to tell the disk management to rediscover drives but to no avail. Finally, came the sledgehammer. I bounced the actual FC ports. This fixed the problem.
My question is, is this normal behavior? I thought when I rebooted the windows hosts, it would cause them to do FLOGI again which I thought would be same as bouncing the FC ports. Did bouncing the host ports have anything to do with this resolution? Or was it the bouncing of the DISK ports that was the fix? What situation did I get myself into that the drive could not be seen by windows even though it was zoned to it?

Answer 1

I have seen Windows OS do some weird things like this. I have had to reboot the system when the HBA config tool saw the FC attached luns and they looked just fine in the tool, but Disk Manager would not pick them up.
I have traced, as Inch suggested, with a PAA-2 and MDS span, and issued a re-scan on the Windows Disk Manager panel...and the trace show nothing being sent by the port the Windows box was plugged into. I had to bounce the port on the MDS and I saw the Windows box issue all the normal bring up stuff and register with the FC nameserver...then it got all the devices in teh zone...then I expected a PLOGI from the HBA to the storage device....nothing.
That's when I rebooted and the trace showed the Windows box finally issue the PLOGI and PRLI to the storage device.
Bottom line, when I make changes to zoning for a Windows environment, I reboot.
Linux and Solaris seem to handle zone changes better. As for AIX 5.3...let's not go there :)
My 2 cents,
Mike