topic Re: Blades, VC, and multipathing in BladeSystem - General

Blades, VC, and multipathing

NJK-Work — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:48:52 GMT

On a normal blade setup, with say 2 VC SAN modules, how does a Windows 2003 server normally see the disks? Does is see two disks, where one is the actual disk and the other is a "phantom" disk down the second VC module path? Or does Windows 2003 only one disk, even though there are two paths to the same disk?

Or, is there some HP multipathing software that I am supposed to install that works with the VC modules?

The reason I ask is that we use a FalconStor SAN product and we see 4 disks in the OS (two down each path) and we have to use a software product called "DynaPath" to "fix" this and tell the OS to only see one disk.

So for those of you that have a "normal" SAN, do you see two disks (or maybe 4 I guess) or do you just see the one disk? Did you have to install some HP software to get this to work?

Thanks
Nelson

Re: Blades, VC, and multipathing

karim h — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 02:06:00 GMT

This is normal behaviour in the absence of an installed MPIO driver from your storage vendor.

You need only install the MPIO driver you would typically use in the rest of your SAN environment, there is no specific HP VC MPIO driver.

VC SAN modules provide very crude FC switching capabilities, it is not really a FC switch, it operates more like a traditional ethernet-style Hub.

Re: Blades, VC, and multipathing

NJK-Work — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:02:36 GMT

Thank you. That is what I needed.

Nelson

Re: Blades, VC, and multipathing

NJK-Work — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:03:10 GMT

The storage vendor provides the multipathing software.