Storage side MPIO configuration

[jlm77]

Hi,

I have configured 2 ESXi 4.1 Servers with 2 NIC's for ISCSI Data and configured MPIO as per VMWares whitepaper, but I have a question on the storage configuration for MPIO.

We have Thecus N8800Pro's configured as ISCSI storage, they have 2 NIC's each but the NIC's can't be given IP's on the same subnet. 

What would be the best way to configure these? 

I can see 2 options

A) Give the 2 storage NIC's IP's on different subnets and modify the Vsphere configuration to encorperate this.

Would this allow me to configure the storage paths with round robbin MPIO? 

Would this give much performance advantage?

B) Configure the NIC's with one of the link aggrigation options they support but i'm not sure how well this would work with MPIO.

They support:-

Load Balance (mode=0, balance-rr)
Round-robin policy

Failover (mode=1, active-backup)

Balance-XOR (mode=2, balance-xor)

Balance-TLB (mode=5, balance-tlb)

Balance-ALB (mode=6, balance-alb)

Thanks

[chriswahl]

You can use unique subnets and still achieve MPIO with iSCSI. Make sure you are using iSCSI binding on the vSphere host. You should end up with 2 paths to the device. One will be Active (I/O) and the other simply Active, unless you use round robin.