Just a short query: I have a Dell Md3200i setup to serve LUNs to my 2 physical hosts and I'm running vSphere/ESXi v5 with a number of VM's. Is it normal behavior for ALL VM's and LUN's to run off the one controller all the time? At the moment everything is running through Controller1.
I setup 2- 6 drive RAID10 arrays and wanted 1 array running via Controller0 and the other array via Controller1 to get a bit of load balancing going. But when I set 'Ownership' like that in the MD Manager it seems to migrate itself back to the one controller.
When I check the VM's MPIO modes in ESXi they all have 4 paths back to Controller1 as Active and 4 paths back to Controller0 as Standby.
I have played around pulling one controller out and it seems to all re-route itself to the other Controller. So it seems like its all via one controller at a time but just wanting to make sure I didn't screw something up in the setup ;)
Is this expected behavior??
you can set up a controller as primary and as stdby, for every LUN. Since the MD3xxx is an LSI rebrand, it uses RDAC, and RDAC has half the paths in stadby, it's an active/passive path management system, unlike MPIO which is active/active
The array seems to be configured for redundant paths: has built in. Unless you choose a daisy chain connectivity with more enclosures....active/standby is the default behaviour.
I don't have the MD3200i, but I do have 4 MD3200's.. for the SAS controllers, you can set each virtual disk to use a different controller as primary.. You can't do that for the individual partitions you create inside the virtual disk.. You really want to split them, so they don't fight each other for writes.. (and same with the disks underneath)