Does ESX Host provides Load Balancing to FC Storage ?

[TonyJK]

I am aware that ESX host provides path failover for FC Storage. Does it also provide load balancing ? If yes, is it necessary for us to set up or it is done automatically ?

Thanks

[weinstein5]

With 3.5 there is experiemental support for round robin load balancing - it is not set automatically - check out -

[JaySMX]

ESX supports failover by default, but like said above actual load balancing is not fully supported. Depending on your FC SAN, you may not want more than one path in use as this can cause LUN thrashing in an active/passive array.

[kjb007]

While there is experimental support for load balancing directly through the host, you can also manually configure active paths to the LUNs to provide a pseudo load blancing. You can do this through the storage management section of esx configuration.

-KjB

[Texiwill · Accepted solution]

Hello,

VMware ESX does not provide Aggregation or Load Balancing for FC-HBA. It does however provide failover. You can however when using an active/active SAN or multiple SANs zone your traffic through more than one GBIC within your system. But that is not true load balancing, it is 100% by hand.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

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Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization