Redundant HBAs in ESX host, same or different vendors

[joebabbo]

Does anyone have a Best Practices or real life experience regarding optimal redundancy for FC HBAs?

I have two main scenarios:

- multiple identical HBAs (optimal compatibility, vulnerable to firmware issues)

- multiple vendor HBAs (possible failover behavior differences, performance impact, immune to single vendor firmware issues)

Thanks

[Datto]

For my purposes in a production environment, I would use the same make and model of HBAs in a production server in order to have the greatest compatibility, then have a test lab with the same make and model HBAs and server where I would test any changes to HBAs.

If you're talking updates to your SAN make the HBAs unable to communicate, that's a different scenerio.

Datto

[AntonVZhbankov]

I would definitely not mix different vendors. Firmware problems are not really often to count them in.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[joebabbo]

Thanks for the replies. I agree with both your assessments and that was my recommendation also.