How to Balance the SAN Controller I/O between my ESX hosts?

[wallabyfan2]

Hello Good Community -

Question regarding how to balance SAN Controller I/O between my ESX hosts.

I have identified Controller A and Controller B on my SAN, HP EVA 6100.

Controller A 50001FE1 500E1208

Controller B 50001FE1 500E120C

But when I go to "Storage Adapters" and then "Manage Paths" per vmhba and I am lost. LB Policy is Fixed. I see then:

vmhba1:0:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:08 *Status: Active, Preferred

vmhba1:1:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:0c

vmhba2:0:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:09

vmhba2:1:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:0d

So the first two on my controllers, not sure about the bottom two WWWN's however, can someone who knows HP EVA help here.

Also, I am very confused in regards to mirror ports and the need to be careful when Balancing the Path between controller.

What would be most excellent if someone could give me some whitepapers to read on this, knowledge base articles even and also just explain how to approach the above and consider VMs as well.

Not too big then...just small forum post I've raised here...Hope it helps someone helps though to get a dialogue going.

[JasonBurrell · Accepted solution]

What I do with my EVA is have different LUNs(Datastores) manually selected to a preferred path in Command View. For Example LUNs 1,3,5,7 are set to Path A while LUNs 2,4,6,8 are set to Path B. This would assume that all of your LUNs are equally loaded. On the ESX side each of my machines has 2 HBAs each with 2 paths it looks like your setup. Here is what I think load balanced looks like:

ESX01-

vmhba1:0:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:08 - LUN 1,2

vmhba1:1:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:0c - LUN 3,4

vmhba2:0:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:09 - LUN 5,6

vmhba2:1:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:0d - LUN 7,8

ESX02-

vmhba1:0:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:08 - LUN 5,6

vmhba1:1:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:0c - LUN 7,8

vmhba2:0:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:09 - LUN 1,2

vmhba2:1:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:0d - LUN 3,4

It might not even be necessary to have a complicated load blancing setup if you do not produce enough IO to saturate your current setup. You might want to just keep it like this:

ESX01-

vmhba1:0:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:08 - LUN 1,2

vmhba1:1:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:0c - LUN 3,4

vmhba2:0:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:09 - LUN 5,6

vmhba2:1:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:0d - LUN 7,8

ESX02-

vmhba1:0:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:08 - LUN 1,2

vmhba1:1:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:0c - LUN 3,4

vmhba2:0:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:09 - LUN 5,6

vmhba2:1:6 50:00:1f:e1:50:0e:12:0d - LUN 7,8

Hope this helps