EVA4400 and vmware4

[WilliamSmith11]

Hi
I am going to install an EVA4400 with several ESX server.

How I should present the disk policy
Fixed, failover and failback.

I will have more than one data store presented from the EVA4400 to the ESX (several 2TB disk drives)

Regards

w.s

[Víctor Cespón]

That's on the EVA4400 user guide:

Operating system: VMWare
Default behavior: Auto failback done by the host
Settings supported: No Preference, Path A/B â Failover Only.

[WilliamSmith11]

I am going to configure 4 data store.
Will be recommended to prefer the lun 1 and 2 to path A and the lun 3 and 4 to path B?

[Uwe Zessin]

Which ESX version?

On 3.x you _have_ to configure the ESX server to use the correct path, because by default it uses the first path it finds. After some time, the EVA detects this and can transfer ownership of _all_ virtual disks to one controller!

On 4.x I think you have to tell ESX to respect the ALUA (asymmetrical logical unit access) information provided by the EVA (sorry, don't have the info at hand).

[Niels Vejrup Pedersen]

You should set the path policy to Round Robin in vSphere/ESX4 - this enables ALUA. And will only use the optimized path.

You should prefer half of the LUNs to each controller for optimized performance.

Remember to set the path policy to be Round Robin default in the config file, or change it manually on each host.

Regards