ISCSI HBA Dual Port Question

[76dragon]

Ive been using the software initiator for some time now in a test environment and ive just purchsed a ISCSI HBA card with Dual Ports, Sorry is this is a dumb question but im wondering if someone could tell me if the dual port card shows up under Network Adapters as two devices or if its just one and the Dual Port is means to provide a second path via another Switch e.g. Port1 goes to SwitchA and Port2 goes to SwitchB

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Berniebgf · Accepted solution]

Hello Dragon,

The card will be seen as two ports under VMware ESX. Have a look at the following thread, there is some relevent info in there for you.

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/145928;jsessionid=B35DD3A3AB2CA5C97C5BC12E726593A4?tstart=14

best regards

Bernie

[76dragon]

Thanks for the quick reply,

If im only going to have a single ISCSI san is there any point in having a dual port card, My main concern with ISCSI is redundancy, Can anyone tell me how the best way to go about having an ESX server connected to ISCSI storage with redundacy.

If the dual ports shw up as two initiators, then would i configure both to point to the same target, giving me two paths ?

Thanks for your help.

[happyhammer]

You will only be able to configure one active path to each LUN, The dual port will give you redundancy and will failover in the event of a failure, prefered that each HBA port is connected to a seperate physical switch.

[kjb007]

As happyhammer stated, your connections will be active/passive, but to answer your question, yes, you have to configure both ports for redundancy, but only one will be active.

-KjB

[76dragon]

Thanks Guys much appreciated.