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Does P4500 support persistent reservations?

 
Sheppie
New Member

Does P4500 support persistent reservations?

Hi,

We are trying to get round robin load balancing working to a iSCSI target on P4500 from a Windows 2003 cluster running SQL server.

The Microsoft iSCSI user guide says that in order for the round robin load balance policy to be supported the iSCSI target must support PERSISTENT RESERVE and PERSISTENT RELEASE. In addition a number of registry keys must be added on the cluster nodes to configure persistent reservations.

Unfortunately when we add these registry entries to our cluster nodes neither node is able to access the storage. After a couple of hours with Microsoft support they have concluded that it is a storage problem as they cannot reproduce the issue on their test hardware.

I realise I'll probably have to raise a call with HP for this but I just wondered if anyone else had managed to get persistent reservations/round robin load balancing working with a Windows 2003 cluster and P4500 storage.

SAN/iQ version is 9.0 and we are using the native Microsoft MPIO.

Thanks,
Steve
2 REPLIES 2
Andrew Manhein
Occasional Advisor

Re: Does P4500 support persistent reservations?

Is your ultimate goal to realize equal or near-equal distribution of traffic across all iSCSI NICs? If so, is there a need to avoid using the HP LeftHand MPIO? I have had decent results with both ALB and LACP load-balancing methods on Multi-site cluster nodes and Windows Server 2003/2008. The Windows Servers used the 8.5 and 9.0 HP LeftHand DSM for MPIO. Please expand upon your goals.

Andrew
Sheppie
New Member

Re: Does P4500 support persistent reservations?

Hi Andrew,

Yes our aim is to distributed traffic across the two NICs we have installed in each server. Our decision not to use the HP DSM for multipathing was based on our view that using the native Microsoft s/w would make maintenance easier (no need to upgrade DSM with each new version of SAN/iQ).

Steve