VMworld 2009: Best Practices for Multipathing in VI3.5 and vSphere (TA2467)

This super-session was presented by myself – another packed session.  This has been a popular topic at the last two VMworlds – I try REALLY hard to keep this session and topic as non-EMC specific and as multi-vendor as possible.  (IMHO, it’s not the time/place for too much EMC-specific – that’s for the supersessions and EMC World :-)

The topics covered included storage connectivity and multipathing design best practices across protocols, vendors, and VI3.5 and vSphere.   Topics discussed where:

• the things that have changed in vSphere’s iSCSI initiator, the do’s and don’ts to achieve high throughput.  
• the current CLARiiON iSCSI design consideration to workaround the multiple login issue with iSCSI initiators I discussed here.
• details on the Pluggable Storage Architecture in vSphere, how it works, how to configure SATPs, PSPs via the CLI
• details on how NMP round robin works, and considerations
• Third party PSA modules – EMC’s PowerPath/VE, and the Dell/EqualLogic
• NFS considerations and best practices

Hope you find it useful!!!!

You can download it in PDF format…

Comments

[Olivier Parcollet]

Hi Shad,

Nice and very intersting session.
FYI, the link 'I disscussed here' doesn't work.
I imagine you had a heavy load of work these days

[huberw]

Hi Chad,

Thanks for posting this... Just one quick question...

For nmp round robin in vSphere s it safe to change the IO operation limit to 1 when using an AX4-5i array?

Thanks,

Will

[Chad Sakac]

Will - I'll double check, but believe the answer is YES.

[Bj]

Hi Chad & Will,

VMware only supports (NMP) MRU as Path Policy with the AX4-5i (because of Active/Passive), anyway we want to use NMP RR with an AX4-5i.

@Chad
Have you any recommendations in this case - should it work technically without problems so that we can use it ? Or do you see any problems ?

Thanks in advance for your answer and for providing great informations through your blog!

[scott owens]

How do you see this from a performance and reliability standpoint compared to fiber delivered via FCOE for those ESX hosts that could support either one ?

[Hussain]

Hi Chad,

Is it possible to configure the AX4-5i multipathing without PowerPath?

Thanks,