Balancing LUNs across controllers on EVA8000

[Mel Nugent]

I posted this in VMware also but think its more of a storage issue. I want to balance the Vdisks on the EVA across the controllers as some were set to no preference and some to failover/failback etc.

I have 2 EVA 8000 with CA replication. Each one has a c7000 blade enclosure with 4xBL680c blades running ESX 3.5.

So far I have listed all the presented VMware Vdisks on one EVA and then grouped all the Vdisks by DR group (as I think all Vdisks in a DR group have the same owning controller). I have then set all DR group1 to controller A failover/failback then DR group2 to controller B Failover/Failback and so on. Any Vdisks not replicated I have mixed between A and B.
On the ESX side I have set all Vdisks to fixed and set the preferred path to either WWWN ending in 8,9,A,B, for controller A and ending in C,D,E,F for controller B.

I think this should leave me with Vdisks balanced across controller and also across port on each controller. Can anyone confirm this is OK?
Should I also set the destination replicated Vdisks to failover/failback also and balance across controllers even though they are not presented?
Thanks

[Jan Soska]

Hello Mel,
consider updating your ESX's to newer 4.0 or even 4.1 version. There is rewrited storage system, new drivers, new multipath system recognizing EVA as ALUA aware array and you can use your array with 2 active paths with no problem.
We do not have CA enviroment, but consider it anyway, or do you have any cons?

Jan

[Mel Nugent]

Thanks,
We will not be in a position to update to ESX4 for 6 months. I need to balance these now as we had some issue with replication that highlighted the problem.