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SBaalman
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Contributor

Dual expander and dual HBA setup

 

I'm looking into upgrading our vSAN setup and looking at using a Supermicro chassis that has 24 drive bays with a dual expander backplane and also using 2 HBA cards.  Looking at the manual for the backplane manual, it says it supports the setup but needs Linux MPIO software.  I've looked for some VMware multiplexing but haven't found the answer to make sure.

Here's the link for the Supermicro BPN-SAS3-216EL1/EL2 backplane

https://www.supermicro.com/manuals/other/BPN-SAS3-216EL.pdf 

I will also be using 2 Supermicro AOC-S3008L-L8e HBA cards

https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/accessories/addon/AOC-S3008L-L8e.php 

Has anyone done a setup like this on a host and setup the MPIO/multiplexing so the host sees the drives over the backplane and both the HBAs?

I plan on using 2 800G SAS3 SSD for cache and 14 1920G SAS3 SSD for capacity tiers (2 drive groups per host) and would like the capability to add a 3rd drive group with dual HBAs for failover/loadshare over the backplane

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depping
Leadership
Leadership

No that is not supported. devices should be presented to a single HBA and then to vSAN. if you have 2 disk controllers and 2 disk groups I would recommend having a diskgroup on each HBA individually. 

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SBaalman
Contributor
Contributor

That's what I already have in place and had originally planned.  I saw that other 24 bay chassis with dual expander and was hoping for another possibility.  Thanks for the help! That also explains why I couldn't find the answer I was looking for as it's not supported.

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