HP P4000 and the Windows 2008 windows ISCSI Initiator

[NickC-UK]

Hi All

I am after some help with our HP P4500 setup, we have 2 nodes in a single site cluster and 2 Windows 2008 servers in a file server cluster that use the storage. Each server has 2 seperate NIC's dedicated to ISCSI traffic.

When the 3rd party come and installed it they created all the LUN's, however i have noticed through clicking around trying to get to grips with the solution that when i go into CMC and select a server, then go onto the Volumes and Snapshots tab and look at the volumes some of the volumes have just 2 connections under the gateway connection column, others have 4 connections with DSM against 2 of them (screenshot attached), i have noticed that on the other P4500 cluster that is used soley for our Hyper-V servers we do not get any DSM entrys, the only difference that i can see is that the Hyper-V servers do not have the HP MPIO software installed so conclude that its somthing to do with that.

This is where im struggling to understand how this works, i know its to do with multi pathing but not sure why some have the DSM against and some Volumes do not so hoping there a lefthand expert that can explain and also point me in the correct direction as to how they should be setup. As these should be setup  identically some must be wrong so im looking for the correct way to do it.

Thanks

[Bryan McMullan]

If you don't use the DSM software, you'll only failover. This is just two connections (1 active, 1 failover). You need to install the DSM to get the MPIO connections. Once you have that setup, you'll want to change the MPIO mode to Round Robin to get the most from the DSM. This should give you 1 active connection per node + 1 manager connection. You can setup two host NICs for this per volume (instructions are provided in the DSM user guide).