Load Balancing HBAs

Question

Hello all, I know Powerpath gives us the ability to load balance between 2 HBA cards. But, can we do the same thing with 4 cards? How about 8? Is there a limit on powerpath and load balancing between HBA cards?

cosse · Accepted Answer

The EMC PowerPath Product Guide shows the use of 4 cards and I have used 8 cards before (as long as they are all the same cards) I am not sure what the upward limit is but I have heard of people using 32 cards before on very large systems. How many did you want to use?

"PowerPath Product Guide 5.2 and 5.3 A05"

cosse · Answer

According to my very smart EMC² TC, the limit is 32 Ports. So 32 single port HBA's, 16 dual port HBAs... you get the idea.Message was edited by: cosse

Conor · Answer

PowerPath's limit is 32 PATHS, this could be achieved with as few as two HBA's depending on how many different FA ports you wish to map the devices though. Conor

Allen Ward · Answer

Hmmm... is this a hard limit on the total number of paths, or on the number of paths it can track for a single device?

Not that I really want to do this, but just wondering if you had storage allocated from two arrays could you track 32 paths to devices on each array?

cosse · Answer

I believe that this is a limit to the number of paths to a single device. Powerpath can manage in the thousands of total paths to seperate devices, I believe 4096 is the total path limit.

PowerPath

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