ISCSI config LeftHand and VMware MPIO

[thanmad]

Having trouble getting VMware to actually use the second nic on my LeftHand P4300.  I can find loads of documentation on how to configure VMware for MPIO with LeftHand but they never talk about the LeftHand, they spend the entire doc talking about VMware configs.  I can get the LeftHand to see VMware, but whatever reason it doesn't want to talk to the second nic on the storage.  I have MPIO working just fine on my Equallogic.

On the Left Hand side I've tried LACP (802.3ad), ALB and just straight two nics with separate IPs.

I have a virtual ip address configured and that's what I point VMware at, but every time the VMware ISCSI initiators only connect to the 1st nic on the P4300.

With my working equallogic, i point it at the virtual IP and the VMware ISCSI initiators make a connection to nic 1 and nic 2.  For the life of me i can't figure out how to get VMware to do the same thing on the Lefthand.

anyone have experience with this?

[fnbit]

I do. We have 6 nodes of P4300's, G1 & G2. Ours are setup with their stock 2 1Gbit NICs in ALB mode.

Here's the key:  In LeftHand, every volume has one node assigned to it that acts as the "gateway" for its I/O into the ESXi host.

You point all of your ESXi hosts at the LeftHand Virtual IP address and then the SAN manager will handle load balancing which node serves up which volume. You can then do round robin iSCSI connections on the vSphere side to get multiple NICs talking to the LeftHand.

You get more traffic I/O by having both multiple nodes AND having your VMs split across multiple volumes so that you don't have all of the traffic going to one SAN node.

It's a silly limitation IMHO...because if you were to take that same SAN...send it directly to Windows Server using iSCSI using the HP DSM for MPIO, then you would get TRUE MPIO out of it. That doesn't exist for vSphere. :smileyangry: