SAN Fails When Trunk Down

[5one]

Hi All,

I have successfully configured a new HP P4300 G2 single node SAN (Budget issues) with 2 x HP Procurve 2510G-48 and 2 x HP DL380 G7 ESX 5.1 servers, see the diagram attached.

P4300 has been setup with ALB, failover is working as I have tested it by disabling individual ports on switches which connect the HP servers and SAN but when disabling the trunk (Tagged VLAN) ESX servers fail to connect to the SAN.

Switches have been setup with VLAN as its also being used by LAN traffic, STP is enabled and all the ports used in VLAN50 have enable Flow Control.
 

Switch 1

Ports 27-30 - Untagged VLAN50

Port 45 - Tagged VLAN50

Switch 2

Ports 1-4 - Untagged VLAN50

Port 48 - Tagged VLAN50

Any ideas?

Regards

VJ

[danletkeman]

Are you using an ALB bond on the storage node?

[5one]

Yes I am using ALB on the single P4300 node. Is that wrong?

[danletkeman]

No its not wrong, that is what I am using as well, and the same thing happens to me.  From what I understand is when you use an ALB bond the node is using both nic's for send but only one for receive.  So when the trunk is down the node looses receive connectivity with the other node or the vmware servers depending on which nic it is using for receive connectivity.

You can check this under the network information from the node, to see which mac address is associated to the bond.  Then you can look at your mac address table in the switch and see which one is on which switch.  If the receive interface for one node is on one switch and the other receive interface is on the other switch you will loose quarum.

From what I understand...

[5one · Accepted solution]

Hi,

If anyone is interested, I have managed to get it working but with trunk connection between the switches using to ports in LACP mode. Now if one of the trunk link fails the SAN will still be functional as its only lost 1 of 2 connections.

Now I need to get BackupExec hooked into the iSCSI SAN :)

Regards

VJ