MSA1500 with DL380 servers and ESX 3.0

[jcommatt]

I have a customer using ESX v3.01 with DL380 servers and a MSA1500. They connect to the MSA through 2x16 port StorageWorks switches as they are going to be expanding to 8xDL380's.
When they added a new LUN and presented it to the ESX servers it was okay but then they presented it using SSP to the Windows box and the MSA crashed. We found out that the Windows server did not have any MPIO software on even though it had 2xHBA's in it.
I am looking to load a MPIO drive on the box as a first step and then looking to turn off SSP and setup proper zoning on the switches to help with the extra servers.
Can anyone help me with what MPIO driver to use for their Windows server and also with how the zoning should look ? I am thinking of a zone per ESX host ?
Thanks
Matt

[pswma2 · Accepted solution]

Hi,
create one zone per host, containing only the storage and this host. If you use cluster then put storage and all cluster members in one zone.
For DL380 you can just use HP FF MPIO - installation is straightforward.
If you have Veritas Storage Foundation you can use its DMP instead of HP MPIO.