On Tue, 2010-06-29 at 17:22 -0700, Patrick wrote: > On Jun 29, 6:08 am, Christopher Barry > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > At the end of the day, I am trying to automagically find the optimal > > configuration for the type of storage available (i.e. does it support > > the proprietary MPIO driver I need to work with, dm-multipath, or just a > > straight connection), and what nics on what subnets area available on > > the host, how do these relate to the portals the host can see, and if > > bonding would be desirable. The matrix of possibilities is somewhat > > daunting... > > True, but you can narrow it down a lot, I think. > > If you assign a subnet to each interface on the RAID, and assign one > of those subnets to each interface on the host, you will naturally get > a fault-tolerant path between the host and the RAID. You just need to > probe each RAID IP once.
understood. > > I think I asked before: What type of hardware RAIDs are these, > exactly? dm-multipath is actually very generic; it might "just work" > even if your vendor has their own proprietary software. the vendor is moving to dmmp, but is not there yet. There are incompatibilities in their current release, or I would definitely standardize on the built-in Linux driver. > > Port bonding is still an option, but thinking about it some more... > Unless your RAID also supports bonding, I am not sure it simplifies > your configuration at all. You will need one iSCSI session for each > IP address on the RAID whether you bond the ports on your host or > not. So bonding only simplifies things if you can do it both at the > host and at the target, and even then (a) it will be hard to get good > load balancing and (b) you will be stuck using one (non-redundant) > switch. you may want to have a look at the bonding.txt file in your kernel Documentation directory, or just have a look here: http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/networking/bonding.txt There are actually 6 'modes' available for setting up a bonded virtual interface with the bonding driver. I believe the '802.3ad' mode is the one you're thinking of that requires specific switch or other device support. However, I'm not considering using this mode in this initial implementation, but rather thinking that mode 6, or by it's long name 'balance-alb' might be a good bonding mode to use in this scenario. I'd be very interested in your thoughts on that once you've had a chance to peruse the link and think about the bonding options presented in it. Regards, -C > > - Pat > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "open-iscsi" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/open-iscsi?hl=en.
