Testing HBA failover

[Cyberfed27]

Hey folks,

I have an ESX host that has 2 fiber HBA's for SAN storage communication.

Currently one HBA is showing all the active I/O connections.

The other is showing standby.

My question is how can I force a failover from the active HBA to the standby using vCenter.

We recently moved our SAN and I want to verify that the standby path indeed works in the event of a failure.

I looked at the HBA and storage properties in vCenter but did not see any way to flip the switch so to speak.

[MauroBonder]

You can do a test with "real scenario" but you need a window to do it. If you have window, you can unplug fiber channel to see if works fine your multipath.

May this can help http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datacenter/changing-the-preferred-path-in-vsphere-client/3421.

You can disable a path and change path to check if both paths are working.

With your VI Client > Configuration > DataStore Details > Properties > Manage Path > Right click in path you have follow options (Preferred , Disable)

Please, don't forget the awarding points for "helpful" and/or "correct" answers. 

Mauro Bonder - Moderator

[Cyberfed27]

Thanks will try the disable.

I can't physically pull the cable, they are blade servers and the HBA's are all internal in the backplane.

[Cyberfed27]

Yep disable worked.

I/O failed over as expected. Many thanks.

[MauroBonder]

No problems. You´re welcome

[admin]

If you want to verify the path failover during a hardware failure, you can do it by disabling the switch port connecting to the HBA. When you disable the switch port connecting the active path, ESX will detect this failure and does the following

a) Mark the path connected to the disabled HBA port as 'dead'

b) Change the status of the alternate path from 'standby' to active

You can verify the path status for a particular device using the command "esxcfg-mpath -bd naa.xxxxxx".

Also you can find the current active path using esxcli command "esxcli nmp device list -d naa.xxxxxxxx"

~Sudhish