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Re: Couple of questions: MSA 2012i with dual controller in HA mode

 
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sugar_2
Advisor

Couple of questions: MSA 2012i with dual controller in HA mode

Hello, I said in the last post I have a StorageWorks MSA 2012i with dual controller. There is a barely two diagrams in the online manual on how to setup the HA mode with two controllers and two giga switches. Since my goal is to setup a two node windows 2003 cluster I have three questions about it:

1.- In fact, each controller have two iSCSI ports, with a total of four ports:
A0 IP = 10.10.10.10
A1 IP = 10.10.20.20
B0 IP = 10.10.30.30
B1 IP = 10.10.40.10

How should I connect/add those in the iSCSI initializator? Should I need to add the four in each server? or some like this?
Primary Server - Add A0 and B0 ...?
Secondary Server - Add A1 and B1 iSCSI ...?

2.- What settings should I enable in iSCSI in order to enable the HA mode for the MSA dual controller?

3.- I read that each iSCSI port have 4GB of bandwidth, since my servers have a few Giga ethernet network cards, what kind of Teaming (bonding, load balancing, or some) will enable the server to team two or more NIC's to connect to the iSCSI initializator? Is that possible with my Procurve Switches?

Here again my config details:

- Two DL380G6 Servers
- One MSA 2012i (with two controllers)
- Windows 2003 Enterprise R2
- Two ProCurve 3400 CL Giga Switches

thanks in advance!!!!

Aldo
6 REPLIES 6
Uwe Zessin
Honored Contributor

Re: Couple of questions: MSA 2012i with dual controller in HA mode

1. According to the documentation the iSCSI ports of a single controller module should be in two different IP subnets, e.g.

A0=10.10.1.1/24
A1=10.10.2.1/24

B0=10.10.1.2/24
B1=10.10.2.2/24

2. I am not sure I fully understand the question. From my experience the MSA2012i automatically operations 'HA' mode (=it does controller module failovers) if it has two controllers.

3. No. Those are 1 GigaBit Ethernet ports - the FibreChannel module has 4 GigaBit. The theoretical 'bandwith' (not throughput) to a single volume is two GigaBits (=A0+A1 or B0+B1) - that is because on the MSA2000 generation 1 models a virtual disk (vDisk) and all its volumes is managed and presented by one controller at a time.

It's been some time that I worked with the MSA2012i (and not with W2003),
but I would look into using the Windows iSCSI initiators MPIO.

Maybe with round-robin, but in a VMware ESX environment with a single W2003 guest I was able to get 100+Megabytes/second using large sequential read I/Os.
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sugar_2
Advisor

Re: Couple of questions: MSA 2012i with dual controller in HA mode

Thanks for the response, but I am still confused about how should I add the iSCSI ports in the initializator, should I add the four ports? or only two (one of each controller?)

Thanks in advance

Aldo
Uwe Zessin
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: Couple of questions: MSA 2012i with dual controller in HA mode

All four iSCSI ports on the MSA2012i - otherwise a host might not detect volumes when the only specified port on a controller module is down.
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sugar_2
Advisor

Re: Couple of questions: MSA 2012i with dual controller in HA mode

Thanks a lot for your quick response, I will map all ports ina persistent way with Round Robin algorithm.

Do I need a HP Storage Manager client? Like those used in IBM? Or only the HP MSA Driver and the iSCSI initializator?
Uwe Zessin
Honored Contributor

Re: Couple of questions: MSA 2012i with dual controller in HA mode

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "HP Storage Manager client". The MSA2012i has no extra management interface to be installed on a Windows/Linux platform. Everything can be done through:
- the WEB interface
- a command line interface via telnet/ssh
- a command line interface via the serial maintenance port

If I recall correctly there is also a Windows VDS provider to allow (limited) management through the MMC's SAN Manager in W2003 R2 and up. I've tried it some time ago with another array and wasn't too impressed - each array has its own architecture which cannot easily abstracted, so I prefer the native interfaces (CLI/web SMU for the MSA2000 series).


> iSCSI initializator

No offense, but this is called the "iSCSI [software] initiator".
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sugar_2
Advisor

Re: Couple of questions: MSA 2012i with dual controller in HA mode

Definitively thanks a lot!! =)

I am totally new with SAN matter..