NickFerrar
MIS
We have a Dell/EMC CX3-20 SAN that is currently running fine with several FC attached hosts however we now also want to add some iSCSI hosts but I'm struggling to understand what we need in terms of software and how it all hangs together.
Our current setup for iSCSI is 2 x dedicated 48-port Gb switches with a connection from each going to SP-A and SP-B on the SAN. Hosts will each have 2 TOE-enabled NICs for iSCSI, one going to each switch. This should provide mutli-pathing for storage redundancy.
However we're trying to do this without buying full PowerPath but am not sure if this is supported. Without PowerPath we can see the storage on the SAN just fine but there's no failover happening. Reading some EMC guides I'm still confused about how the MS iSCSI Initiator, EMC PowerPath and EMC NaviSphere Server Utility all fit together (and whether we also need the NaviSphere Host Agent).
It seems the MS iSCSI initiator supports multi-pathing (in W2k3 at least) but is this limited to load-balancing only with no fail-over support? From reading about PowerPath it seems although it supports multi-pathing to it only supports fail-over and not load-balancing? So the result is you can't have both fail-over and load-balancing multi-pathing support with iSCSI (at least to an EMC SAN), seems odd?
If we have to choose fail-over is more important to us than load-balancing but we'd still like to avoid the cost of a PowerPath licence. We figured lets ditch one of the 48-port switches and use adapter teaming on the server to team the iSCSI NICs. That way the only single point of failure is the switch. However although we can team the NICs we just couldn't connect to the SAN SP's whilst they were teamed. I guess it must be unsupported but I've not read anything yet on adapter teaming use with iSCSI. Should it be possible?
The only way we've managed to get it working so far is just single-pathed which is not what we need for a production environment.
Our current setup for iSCSI is 2 x dedicated 48-port Gb switches with a connection from each going to SP-A and SP-B on the SAN. Hosts will each have 2 TOE-enabled NICs for iSCSI, one going to each switch. This should provide mutli-pathing for storage redundancy.
However we're trying to do this without buying full PowerPath but am not sure if this is supported. Without PowerPath we can see the storage on the SAN just fine but there's no failover happening. Reading some EMC guides I'm still confused about how the MS iSCSI Initiator, EMC PowerPath and EMC NaviSphere Server Utility all fit together (and whether we also need the NaviSphere Host Agent).
It seems the MS iSCSI initiator supports multi-pathing (in W2k3 at least) but is this limited to load-balancing only with no fail-over support? From reading about PowerPath it seems although it supports multi-pathing to it only supports fail-over and not load-balancing? So the result is you can't have both fail-over and load-balancing multi-pathing support with iSCSI (at least to an EMC SAN), seems odd?
If we have to choose fail-over is more important to us than load-balancing but we'd still like to avoid the cost of a PowerPath licence. We figured lets ditch one of the 48-port switches and use adapter teaming on the server to team the iSCSI NICs. That way the only single point of failure is the switch. However although we can team the NICs we just couldn't connect to the SAN SP's whilst they were teamed. I guess it must be unsupported but I've not read anything yet on adapter teaming use with iSCSI. Should it be possible?
The only way we've managed to get it working so far is just single-pathed which is not what we need for a production environment.
