StoreVirtual Storage
1748249 Members
3710 Online
108760 Solutions
New Discussion юеВ

Re: Lefthand DSM in Active/Active from a server with dual NICs

 
Pat Misur
Occasional Contributor

Lefthand DSM in Active/Active from a server with dual NICs

Is this possible or will it be possible in a future release?

Currently with the Lefthand DSM, we have only been able to get active/passive failover from dual NICs in the server to 2 VSAs. The option to enable any type of loadbalancing across the NICs in the server is not allowed while using the Lefthand DSM.

What we found was we had really 2 options:
1. Use the Lefthand DSM and loadbalance across the VSAs but only have failover for the NICs from the server

2. Use just Microsoft MPIO (which while not supported does appear to work) and load balance across the NICs from the server but not across the VSAs.

What we are looking at is what options we have if we hit the max throughput for a single 1G connection.
6 REPLIES 6
Gauche
Trusted Contributor

Re: Lefthand DSM in Active/Active from a server with dual NICs

Are you trying to get load balancing our of the windows host to the VSA with multiple nics, or the VSA itself to use multiple nics for load balancing. Those are two very different things.
Adam C, LeftHand Product Manger
Pat Misur
Occasional Contributor

Re: Lefthand DSM in Active/Active from a server with dual NICs

Out of the Windows server with 2(or possibly more) NICs.
JasonE
New Member

Re: Lefthand DSM in Active/Active from a server with dual NICs

I am having similar difficulty with two physical LH nodes, LH DSM, and multiple NICs on a Hyper-V host. I want the data to loadbalance, but it seems to be using only 1 NIC at a time. Failover works fine when I pull a cable, but I want maximum speed as well as redundancy. I have a RAID 5 array of 500GB 7.2K RPM SATA drives at home that can sustain ~300MB/s....so I figure these nodes must be bottlenecked by the single 1Gb connection (~125MB/s)....or at least I should hope so. I've read the 50-page MPIO document from Microsoft regarding their DSM and round-robin, etc...but LH's DSM is not auto-load balancing, and I don't see any configuration options to modify it. If anyone knows where to find documentation on LH's DSM and how to get load-balancing to work, please let me know. Thanks.
Rick Hanks
New Member

Re: Lefthand DSM in Active/Active from a server with dual NICs

Has anyone came up with a solution for the Lefthand DSM issue with load balancing on a host. I have exactly the same issue. You either don't do LB on the array and do it on the hosts or you don't do LB on the hosts and do it on the array. In my case we are looking at the P4300 as a secondary storage target for our replicated data from our remote sites from which we would back up to tape. If I can only use one NIC (outta 4 configured) for IO, I don't think this is going to be a viable option for us.

Re: Lefthand DSM in Active/Active from a server with dual NICs

I'm seeing the same behavior with physical hosts with multiple NICs and the LeftHand DSM.

My setup is 3 Hyper-V 2008 R2 servers with 2 NICs each in the iSCSI network. I followed the instructions for installing the DSM and connecting with multiple NICs to volumes from the Windows Solution Pack.

I see occassional activity on both the NICs, but whenever I test transfering large amounts of data only 1 NIC is ever used.

I'd love to hear a response from HP on this. The HP MSA2000 utilizes both NICs when using MPIO, as do EqualLogic SANs. This is a pretty major flaw in the DSM module.

IainS
Frequent Advisor

Re: Lefthand DSM in Active/Active from a server with dual NICs

Did anyone ever get a solution to this? We are having the same issue and I see this was first raised over a year ago.

This has to be a serious problem with the Lefthand DSM doesn't it, that surely would have been addressed quickly. Or is there a simply config change to make it work?

If it is intended (bad/stupid) behaviour then why do the docs practically insist on doing it this way (and use ALB).

I am going back to no DSM to see if I can get it to work properly that way since using the DSM seems to give only fail-over.