Fiber HBA Teaming

[kegwell]

Is it possible, and supported[/u], in ESX 3.01 to team fiber HBAs for greater throughput (not failover)? For example, if I had an ESX server with two, 2Gb HBAs, 4Gb SAN & switches, can I team the two 2Gb HBAs for near 4Gb throughput?

[biekee · Accepted solution]

No you can not, there is only one active path to a specific LUN. ESX runs with the Active/Passive policy.

bk

[bertdb]

Yes you can, there is only one active path to a specific LUN.

of course, I'm just saying the same thing as biekee. The only way of reaching higher bandwidth is by accessing different LUNs over different paths. However, that's going to be a manual load balancing exercise rather than an automatic one.

[bertdb]

failback policies (MRU, fixed) and disk array behaviour (active/passive or active/active) don't really have anything to do with this.