MPIO for Hardware iSCSI HBAs

[egroeg120]

Dear community.

I have a setup that is slightly ancient, but trying to get running under best possible configuration.

I am running ESX4 (not ESXi), on Dell servers with HARDWARE QLOGIC iSCSI HBAs.

I only have 2 hardware HBAS and reading the Nimble vmware setup document (page 69) states that the software NCM is not supported with H/W iSCSI. Set my path selection policy to "round robin".

Therefore, when I connect my H/W iSCSI HBA in storage adapters and point this at my Nimble group IP, it shows up the created volumes and allows me to connect.

However, it only speaks to the Nimble on one of the nimble ports, not all FOUR - which I would expect with or without the NCM.

If I disconnect the active link, then I loose my storage.

My question is - what is the best setup practice for ESX 4 with hardware iSCSI HBAs and in doing so, should I expect my storage volumes to path over all 4 iSCSI nics on the nimble?

(Is there anything I am missing, perhaps a way to implement the MPIO or path selection policy?)

Thanks

Egroeg

[Nick_Dyer · Accepted solution]

Hey George,

Did you follow the MPIO script required to create multiple paths? As the environment is Essentials licensing the VMware PSP would not be applicable - so this would be the best thing to do. I'm pretty sure this should apply for hardware HBAs as it does with software.

From:

Importance of Path Change Settings in VMware

Firstly run:

esxcli nmp satp addrule --psp VMW_PSP_RR --satp VMW_SATP_ALUA --vendor Nimble

Which sets a policy for all volumes from the vendor of Nimble to be automatically set to Round Robin rather than Most Recently Used.

Then:

Set
for i in `esxcli storage nmp device list | awk '/Nimble iSCSI Disk/{print $7}' | sed -e 's/(//' -e 's/)//'`; do
echo $i ;
esxcli storage nmp psp roundrobin deviceconfig set -d $i -t bytes -B 0;
esxcli storage nmp psp roundrobin deviceconfig set -d $i -t iops -I 0 ;
esxcli storage nmp psp roundrobin deviceconfig get -d $i;
done

Which should create multiple paths for you.

Let me know how you get on....