MPIO and ESX 3.5U4

patrick · Mon May 04, 2009 4:44 pm

I followed the MPIO whitepaper to a T, and everything appears to be working on the Starwind end of things.
The problem I have is that neither of my ESX boxes can see a second path to the storage for failover.
I'm thinking that it has to do with the type of failover I set in the MPIO settings on my server. It's currently set for failover only, with one active and one standby.
Does this setting need to be changed to something like weighted routes in order for ESX to be able to see that 2nd path?

Robert (staff) · Tue May 05, 2009 1:49 pm

Hello patrick,

Would you mind providing some more details of your actions please?

Thanks,
Rob

patrick · Tue May 05, 2009 4:13 pm

I've got 2 ESX hosts, and one computer setup as a SAN, running windows 2008 64bit and starwind.
The SAN has 2 NICs that have IP addresses on different subnets. I followed the MPIO whitepaper to setup MPIO on the SAN. Everything appears to be configured correctly and it matches the what was listed in the whitepaper. The MPIO mode is currently set to failover only, so it has one active and one standby path.

The ESX hosts are using the VMware software iSCSI initiator. Each server has two virtual switches for iSCSI, each runnning a vmkernel and a service console. Each is setup on the respective subnet. From the SAN, I can ping the IPs of both subnets on each ESX host. When scanning for LUNs on the ESX hosts, it only find the primary path to the SAN, though the secondary was added as a target. Which brings us back to my initial question. Do I need to pick a different MPIO mode on the SAN in order for the ESX hosts to be able to see it as a target? Does it need to be active/active to work with ESX? I know that ESX won't actually load balance it with the software iSCSI. I simply want it to have a failover path.

Cheers,

Patrick

patrick · Fri May 08, 2009 3:43 pm

Was my last post enough information? Any more info on this?

Robert (staff) · Mon May 11, 2009 9:37 am

Hello Patrick,

Thank you for a detailed description of your configuration and the scenario.

We would also suggest you taking a look at this document: http://www.starwindsoftware.com/images/ ... nd_ESX.pdf

However, please note that right now HA is not fully supported - this will be implemented quite soon.

Thanks,
Rob