P4300 / Procurve 2910AL / VMWare 4 ESXi

[Andrew Morison]

Hi all,

We are having lots of trouble with a brand new P4300 and getting redundancy to work..
I've included the two SAN configures, but otherwise we have the following:

2x dl380g6 with additional HP NC364T PCI Express Quad Port Gigabit Server Adapter per server

Part of P4300

Two switches have been configured for redundancy for the P4300's in the case of
a switch failure.
In all cases, our VMware server loses connectivity to all path's (there are two
per Lun) when one of the switch is

off, or just one of the paths (which is expected) when the other is off. This is
however random and can change from switch to switch.

We have tried the SAN in both non bonded and bonded (using ALB).

We are seeing wierd things like all of the SAN's ports showing up on an show arp on the procurve showing as directly connected to just one switch, even though they have cables redundanty connected from port 1 to san-sw011 and port 2 to san-sw02 and so on...

It doesn't seem that there is any documentation on how to configure a Procurve with the Lefthand and VMWare, which I would have thought was a pretty common scenario..

We have also read and implemented from the following:
http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA3-0261ENW.pdf

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/09/a-multivendor-post-on-using-iscsi-with-vmware-vsphere.html

I'm sure you will have more questions of me..

[Bryan McMullan]

Sounds like you may have MAC flapping. But I believe the SAN side of the equation should only receive on one port (arp on one switch) but send from both when using ALB. So you should see the mac on one switch, and then on failure of that switch...it should be on the second.

Do you have a trunk setup between the switches? You will not want two completely independent cables connecting the two or it will cause STP issues.

[Matthew D]

Andrew,

When you say you have multiple paths do you mean multiple storage paths (configuration -> storage adapters) or just multiple network paths (configuration -> networking)? My preferred configuration is to create two storage paths (must use command line, can't do it in the GUI) and bond them to two different adapters. This way a physical link failure translates directly into a single storage path failure and storage connectivity isn't (shouldn't) be lost when a single switch goes down. With a single storage path and multiple network links the iSCSI connection will often drop and reconnect during a switch failure or restart.