hp p2000 iscsi 4 ports per host

[Petar Golubovich]

Hi,

I'm looking at connecting 2 hosts to P2000 MSA array FC/iSCSI model using iSCSI ports - so 2x2 1GB connections.
The cable guide (and previous experience) say these should be cabled one connection from each server to each of the two switches, and then one connection from each switch to each controller - so I'd end up with 2GB from a single host into the switch, and then 2GB from each switch into P2000.

What I'm wondering about now is if the host can have 4x1GB into the switches (so 2 connections to each switch) so each host can use all 4GB of iSCSI bandwidth; this will be an active/passive cluster, so 4GB from each host would be much preferred to 2GB each.
Remembering how iSCSI is set up in Windows this should be possible (4 MPIO targets from each host instead of 2), but I cannot find any info in P2000 documentation on whether this is supported/recommended (or possible in practice).

Does anyone have more info - or has anyone done this (successfully or not)?

Many thanks,
Petar

[Petar Golubovich]

Just to clarify in case the above is too much text - instead of default server1 to A0 and B0, server 2 to A1 and B1 ports, I'm looking at configuring the P2000 ports as A0, B0, C0 and D0 (each port on own subnet) and then connecting server 1 to all and server 2 to all.

This is in prep for a system that needs to go live very soon and HW will take 4 weeks to be delivered, so we have to get it right and help is highly appreciated!

[Petar Golubovich]

Anyone?
Someone surely must have tried to get more than 2Gbps from iSCSI storage...

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello Petar,

each controller hast two 1 GbE ports. A vdisks is owned by a single controller. Because of this you will never get "4 GB/s" by using all four channels. If IO is done by the non-owning controller, the IO will travel over the mirrorconnection and is done by the owning controller. This overhead is done by every single read IO that is done by the non-owning controller. Write IO is always mirrored, so a write IO over a non-owning controller will result not in a overhead.

Regards,
Patrick