Current state of multipathing on Enterprise Linux

[Adam Garsha]

What do folks use these days for multipathing on Linux against HP EVA storage arrays?

[Angus Crome]

I'm pretty sure EMC's powerpath will perform against an EVA, but don't know of anyone who is actually using it that way.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

The OS itself will handle multi-pathing without an add in product. Advanced features that powerpath offers such as load balancing will not be present.

Based on actual experience with Red Hat 4 update 4.

SEP

[Uwe Zessin]

We use the embedded failover in the QLogic driver. Last time I checked, the device mapper was not considered mission critical quality by HP.

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi Adam,

The HP drivers for the QLogic cards work fine on Linux. There's nothing too fancy, just basic failover on a path failure, but they work. Not sure how they fair on newer Active/Active EVAs though.

I've had production systems running RHEL2.1 and 3.0 with these drivers, and apart from one installation glitch, had no problems.

Regards,

Rob

[Colin Topliss · Accepted solution]

Have a look at the following link:
http://www.novell.com/documentation/sles10/index.html?page=/documentation/sles10/stor_evms/data/b4qbr1x.html

It explains about the multipathing available out of the box with SUSE Linux. It works well (but there is an issue if you want to use it with ServiceGuard - SG doesn't like using a multipath device as a lock LUN).

Regards

Colin