In the official Huawei HCIA-Cloud Computing curriculum, specifically in the module "Huawei Virtualization Platform Management and Usage," the process for connecting hosts to storage is strictly defined. For storage types that rely on an Ethernet network (IP-based storage), such as IP SAN (iSCSI), NAS (NFS), and Huawei Distributed Block Storage (FusionStorage), the system requires the configuration of "Storage Ports" on each host. A storage port is a logical interface created on a physical NIC or a bond of NICs on a CNA (Computing Node Agent) node.

The reason this step is mandatory is that these storage protocols require an IP address to establish a session between the host (Initiator) and the storage device (Target). Without adding a storage port and assigning it a valid IP address within the storage network's segment, the host cannot communicate with the storage controllers. For IP SAN, this port is used to discover LUNs; for NAS, it is used to mount shared folders; and for Distributed Block Storage, it is used by the VNA (Virtual Node Agent) to communicate with the storage pool.

In contrast, forFC SANstorage, "storage ports" in the IP sense are not required because the Fibre Channel protocol uses World Wide Names (WWNs) on the Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) for identification. The Huawei documentation emphasizes that the storage network (Storage Plane) should be logically or physically isolated from the management and service planes to ensure high performance and security. Therefore, configuring storage ports with dedicated IPs is a prerequisite for creating a datastore on any IP-based storage backend in FusionCompute.

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