ALUA and ESX

[esnmb]

I am thinking about enabling this on my CX4 but wanted to check something out first.

1) I would enable it one host at a time.

2) The host would be in maintenance mode to ensure no VM is running.

3) Success!! 

My hosts are part of a cluster that has access to multiple LUNS.  Doing one host at a time shouldn't effect the other live hosts with running VM's once the host is changed to use ALUA and the multipathing is set to RR, right?

Once one host is done, I take it out of maintenance mode, then move on to the next host...

Thanks in advance.

Matt

[mcowger]

The hosts dont need to be in maint. mode to do this...

[esnmb]

With running VM's nothing will go down?

[mcowger · Accepted solution]

Correct, you can do this on a live datastore with running VMs.

[esnmb]

Do these steps all hold true still?

http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2010/02/04/configure-vmware-esxi-round-robin-on-emc-storage/

I do see that this article is old, so I think it is much easier in 4.1 via the vSphere client and EMC's VSI plugin's...

[depping]

Use the VSI plugins. You can do this live with VMs running on their. I have done this multiple times in the past and never experienced an issue. Do note that your array needs to be configured for ALUA as well... (failover mode 4 in your case)

Duncan

Yellow-bricks.com | HA/DRS technical deepdive - the ebook

[esnmb]

Gotcha.  Thanks all.  Most helpful!

[esnmb]

One more thing, does enabling ALUA on the CX4 enable VAAI?

[mcowger]

No - FLARE 30 (I believe) is what enables VAAI.

[esnmb]

ok cool. EMC told me to hold off a month or two ago as there was a known memory leak on the version at the time.  Not sure if they resolved it yet...

[depping]

lets hope they did if that really is the case :-s

Duncan

Yellow-bricks.com | HA/DRS technical deepdive - the ebook