ESXi 5.5 Loadbalancing with VNX issue

[uzee]

Hi All,

We are running ESXi 5.5 with EMC VNX on the back end for storage. We recently had an issue with Storage and EMC recommended a "firmware upgrade" and load balancing from the hosts to both SPA and SPB. I had thought inititally that the storage array may have some mechanism of load balancing but seems like that's not the case. EMC suggested Powerpath of course but we have been bitten by powerpath in the past twice and have completely removed it from our environment since. The root cause was identified as on of the storage processors being overloaded, hence the recommendation for load balancing. We have a iscsi environment no FC so that might be the reason powerpath was acting up.

Does anyone know of any other mechanism to achieve load balancing? I was reading VMware KB: Load balancing using Round Robin multipathing policy on EMC VNX arrays and it sounds like it addresses the very problem that I'm asking about, but we already have "Round Robin" selected for all the hosts under Host -> Configuration Tab -> Storage -> Properties -> Manage Paths. If my understanding is correct, then traffic is already being load balanced across both Service Processors, no?

Does anyone have any advice/suggestions, please...?

Thanks

[a_p_]

>>> ... being load balanced across both Service Processors, no?

No. Each LUN is owned by only one SP at a time, and the Round-Robin load balancing works across the target ports on the owning SP.

Depending on what exactly is the bottleneck (network, SP load, ...) it may make sense to distribute the VM's across multiple LUNs and make sure the LUNs with high I/O are not owned by the same SP.

André

[uzee]

hrrmmm.... thanks Andre, I'll need to go back to check the LUN configuration and see if I can correctly identify the bottleneck. I'll come back once I have the info.

Meanwhile if anyone else has any suggestions/advice/tips, please feel free....

[JPM300]

hey uzee,

On the luns you are having troubles with, what is your DVAG in esxtop?