topic Current state of multipathing on Enterprise Linux in Operating System - Linux

Current state of multipathing on Enterprise Linux

Adam Garsha — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 12:44:29 GMT

What do folks use these days for multipathing on Linux against HP EVA storage arrays?

Re: Current state of multipathing on Enterprise Linux

Angus Crome — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 21:25:37 GMT

I'm pretty sure EMC's powerpath will perform against an EVA, but don't know of anyone who is actually using it that way.

Re: Current state of multipathing on Enterprise Linux

Steven E. Protter — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 04:52:09 GMT

Shalom,

The OS itself will handle multi-pathing without an add in product. Advanced features that powerpath offers such as load balancing will not be present.

Based on actual experience with Red Hat 4 update 4.

SEP

Re: Current state of multipathing on Enterprise Linux

Uwe Zessin — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 11:51:38 GMT

We use the embedded failover in the QLogic driver. Last time I checked, the device mapper was not considered mission critical quality by HP.

Re: Current state of multipathing on Enterprise Linux

Rob Leadbeater — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 12:30:00 GMT

Hi Adam,

The HP drivers for the QLogic cards work fine on Linux. There's nothing too fancy, just basic failover on a path failure, but they work. Not sure how they fair on newer Active/Active EVAs though.

I've had production systems running RHEL2.1 and 3.0 with these drivers, and apart from one installation glitch, had no problems.

Regards,

Rob

Re: Current state of multipathing on Enterprise Linux

Colin Topliss — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 16:11:55 GMT

Have a look at the following link:
http://www.novell.com/documentation/sles10/index.html?page=/documentation/sles10/stor_evms/data/b4qbr1x.html

It explains about the multipathing available out of the box with SUSE Linux. It works well (but there is an issue if you want to use it with ServiceGuard - SG doesn't like using a multipath device as a lock LUN).

Regards

Colin