Accelerated iSCSI and HP P4000 DSM for MPIO

[Xubair]

Can I use HP 4000 DSM for MPIO for accelerated iSCSI ports/initiators. I have BL460 Gen8 servers with HP FlexFabric 10Gb 2P 554FLB adapters running with Windows 2008 R2. VC with iSCSI cook book is saying "The HP P4000 DSM for MPIO software is not supported with Accelerated iSCSI HBA under Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008". Please guide me if not HP 4000 DSM, will Microsoft DSM (builtin) wil work effectivey ?

[Emilo]

You can use MS MPIO but this will provide you only with failover. In order to implement you will need to configure 2 adapters on the MS host and these cannot be in a team. Each adapter must have its own IP address. If you want to boost perfromance and redundancy then dont use the HW accelaterated feature you will gain much more in performance by installing and configuring DSM. The is one thing to keep in mind this does work better with at least 3 nodes.

[Xubair]

Thanks for your reply.

I have HP FlexFabric 10Gb 2P 554FLB card installed, teo ports are iSCSI ports (accelerated) I configured two seperate ports with different IP addresses. My P4800 storage is acessible via two paths. I want to use hardware accelerated feature, map these two ports in iSCSI section of server profile (Virtual Connect). Can I use P4000 DSM for MPIO ?

[giladzzz]

Hi

with hardware accelerated ISCSI you have to use microsoft MPIO but it works if you want to make sure download from HP

HP Virtual Connect with iSCSI Cookbook and read the part on accelerated ISCSI.

Take into acount that P4000 features like CMC and application aware snapshots  Installing FOM on ESX don't know how to use harware ISCSI.

Regards

[Emilo]

Here is the compatibilty matrix

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA2-5654ENW.pdf

Just use the HBA / Flex fabric cards and dont concern yourself to much with the accelartion.

You loose to much as explained  in the post above.

You will pick up much better performance using DSM.