2 or 4 ports hbas?

[tdubb123]

I got 2 hba cards on a dell server. however I am using only  ports on each hba going to differnt fiber switch. Is there any advantage to using u the other hba ports on the hba?

[jrmunday]

What path selection policy are you using? If you're using fixed, then the additional paths would offer you some more redundancy against dead paths but probably not any performance benefits.

Where you may see a performance benefit, is if you have multiple LUN's and manually balance the the preferred IO across each path. So as an example, if you have 4x LUN's (with a fixed path selection policy), then you can set each path as the preferred one to each LUN. This makes use of all paths, and still has the remaing three for redundancy.

Message was edited by: jrmunday

[tdubb123]

i am using round robin. would there be benefits going all 4 hba ports?

[jrmunday]

Yes, for similar reasons to above (additional paths for redundancy) - the default number of IOps that are sent down in each path is 1000.

If performance is your primary objective then you should be looking to increase the speed (say from 2GB to 4GB, or 4GB to 8GB) of your HBA's and SP's rather than simply adding more paths.

Cheers,

Jon