Hi Paul, Thanks for the response. I actually now have physical access to the kit we have bought and it turns out I mis-understood exactly what we have. Rather than purchasing HBA's we have purchased network cards that do ISCSI offloading I believe its called iSOE.
I have been able to set up one system using software ISCSI initiation and ignoring iSOE so now the plan for this week is to see if I can get iSOE working and compare the two systems :) Paul M. Dyer wrote: > Hi Clint, > > My feeling is that the NIC on the server is not where most multipath happens. > You could use bonding for 2 NICs to have a secondary NIC take over if the > path from server NIC-1 gets disconnected. > > On the other end is where multipath takes place. On a setup that I have, > multipath logs in to 4 different paths on the SAN, and shows the paths with > "multipath -l": > > xr (36006016025302300a2f50e7c0981de11) dm-10 DGC,RAID 1 > [size=24G][features=1 queue_if_no_path][hwhandler=1 emc][rw] > \_ round-robin 0 [prio=0][active] > \_ 1:0:0:6 sdz 65:144 [active][undef] > \_ 3:0:0:6 sdaa 65:160 [active][undef] > \_ round-robin 0 [prio=0][enabled] > \_ 2:0:0:6 sdab 65:176 [active][undef] > \_ 4:0:0:6 sdac 65:192 [active][undef] > > > Paul > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Clint Dilks" <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] > Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 9:09:09 PM (GMT-0600) America/Chicago > Subject: Help with ISCSI SAN > > Hello Everyone > > I am wanting feed back from people familiar with Dell Equallogic ISCSI SANS. > > Our organization has just purchased a Dell Equallogic ISCSI SAN with > all the equipment required to allow a host to have fully redundant paths > to this SAN. > > We have also purchased PowerEdge Servers with Broadcom NetXtremeII Nics > /ISCSI HBA's. On some of these servers we want to run Redhat Enterprise > Linux 5.4 or CentOS 5.4 > > I can find documentation on using Software ISCSI initiators, but nothing > on using Broadcom Hardware HBA's so I am assuming it is a case of go > into the BIOS of the server put in the license key for the Hardware HBA > and then another device that looks like a Nic will be present once RHEL > or CentOS is installed. Is this correct ? > > If this is the case I am assuming I still use the open iscsi initiator > tools to manage things ? > > To ensure redundancy each Linux host will have two nics going connected > to the ISCSI network. And I am aware that I can use dmsetup / multipath > to setup a redundant device but one thing that confuses me is that if > the two nics (each connected to a separate switch) are on the same > subnet (as Dell have instructed me to do) how can you guarantee that > the two connections you see are using the appropriate redundant paths ? > Or is this not really an issue ? > > > Thank you for any thoughts or experiences that you can share related to > a setup like this, and have a nice day :) > > > _______________________________________________ > Linux-PowerEdge mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge > Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq > > _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list [email protected] https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
