NickF If you are looking to take advantage of the ALUA behavior available then you would need to change the fail over mode to 4. If your host HBA's are set to MRU and you are using the Clariion in the default active/passive configuration then failover mode 1 is correct.
Thanks for the replies. I think I was getting confused by the Clariion/VMware integration guide and thinking you had to run in Failover Mode 4 with ESX 4 to be supported but I guess it's just an option. I think our Flare is too old for that anyhow (04.28.000.5.504), although we do have a request in currently to get it patched.
As it looks like I'm sticking with Failover Mode 1 for the ESX hosts (with MRU policy) is that going to cause problems when I have a Windows 2008 R2 VCB server connecting to the same LUN as the ESX servers? From the Windows host integration guide it looks like you need to use Failover Mode 4 for Windows MPIO native multi-pathing (and this seems to work for a SQL cluster we have SAN attached, although I'm a bit concerned now regarding the Clariion Flare version). I'll be disabling automount etc. so I don't trash the VMFS but I'll still have the ESX hosts connected via Failover Mode 1 and the Windows host connected via Failover Mode 4 to the same LUN, is that going to cause any issues or am I worrying too much about how much effect Failover Mode configured on a host has on a LUN?
RobertDudley
2 Intern
•
448 Posts
0
February 2nd, 2010 09:00
harshab
20 Posts
1
February 2nd, 2010 11:00
CLARiiON with Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) mode is
supported beginning with ESX 4.0. For CLARiiON, the default
failover mode for ESX host is failover mode 1 with the storage type as
Active/Passive. When ESX host is registered in failover mode 4,
ALUA mode is enabled. In such a case, the CLARiiON array will
behave similarly to an Active/Active array. The ESX server applies
the "Fixed" policy to CLARiiON devices in a VMware native
multipathing environment by default.
Note the following:
◆
ESX 3.5 and earlier do not support ALUA mode
◆
ESX 4.0 with VMware native Multipathing fixed policy supports
Flare 04.28.00.5.704 or later in ALUA mode
◆
ESX 4.0 with PowerPath /VE supports Flare 03.26 or later in
ALUA mode
Phuzzi
13 Posts
0
February 3rd, 2010 00:00
Thanks for the replies. I think I was getting confused by the Clariion/VMware integration guide and thinking you had to run in Failover Mode 4 with ESX 4 to be supported but I guess it's just an option. I think our Flare is too old for that anyhow (04.28.000.5.504), although we do have a request in currently to get it patched.
As it looks like I'm sticking with Failover Mode 1 for the ESX hosts (with MRU policy) is that going to cause problems when I have a Windows 2008 R2 VCB server connecting to the same LUN as the ESX servers? From the Windows host integration guide it looks like you need to use Failover Mode 4 for Windows MPIO native multi-pathing (and this seems to work for a SQL cluster we have SAN attached, although I'm a bit concerned now regarding the Clariion Flare version). I'll be disabling automount etc. so I don't trash the VMFS but I'll still have the ESX hosts connected via Failover Mode 1 and the Windows host connected via Failover Mode 4 to the same LUN, is that going to cause any issues or am I worrying too much about how much effect Failover Mode configured on a host has on a LUN?
Thanks,
Nick