[MSA 1000] Adding second FC controller

[Kevin Bertens]

Hi,

I Still haven't found any good resources, but I was wondering what is best practice for adding a second controller in our MSA 1000? All documents I have found (including those on the HP site) are about replacing a controller instead of adding one.

Our situation:
* 1 MSA 1000 (1 FC Controller on 7.10 Active/Active firmware, 13x 300 GB SCSI)
* 1 Extra enclosure (13x 300 GB)
* 2 Windows Server 2008 SP2 servers acting as a Filecluster
* Couple of arrays and logical drives
* All connected with FC

Our goal:
Adding a second FC controller to increase I/O performance

Since good documentation is hard to find, is it really as simple as:

* Making a backup of the controller's configuration (how?)
* Bringing everything down
* Adding the second controller
* Bringing everything up again (firmware and config is being copied to the new controller now?)
* Installing HPMPIO on servers
* Done?!

Any help would be apreciated.


Greetings,

Kevin

[Christian--]

Hi Kevin, on the MSA1000 you can add the second controller online. It will then ask to copy over the firmware from one to the other controller.
You'll also need a second fiber channel i/o module or a second switch (hub is not supported in A/A) and a correct zoning configuration.

But don't expect too much of a performance gain, the controller(U160) are just too old.

Greetings,

Christian

[Kevin Bertens]

Hi Cristian,

Thanks for the reply. What do you mean by zoning exactly? I'm only familiar with zoning on EVA storages. Do you mean installing MPIO on the cluster servers to make sure no duplicate LUN's are presented?


Greetings,

Kevin

[Michael Taljaard]

Hi Kevin

It seems christian is refering to the zoning on the Fabrics,When you go thru a Fibre switch you will have to create aliases for each of your Devices(Host HBA and storage FC Port) and map the world wide names of each device to each alias,you will then create a new Zone and add Both aliases to the zone this will enable comunication between the two different Devices via wwn also known as wwn zoning or soft Zoning,other method you can use is to do hard zoning where you zone the port numbers of the switch together instead of the wwn also known as hard zoning or Port zoning Once your devices can see each other you will mask the host to the correct Disk group you created on the storage Device using ACU on the Server.

Hope this answers your question

Kind Regards
MichaelT