Home / server / Questions / 751799
Accepted
Gareth Hastings
Asked: 2016-01-27 03:45:56 +0800 CST

Will a Dell Equallogic PS-M4110 use both Fabric A1 and A2?

  • 772

Does anyone know if this SAN when configured to run on Fabric A of a Dell M1000e should be able to work on either A1 or A2?

I have one configured along with Force 10 - MXL 10/40 switches in Fabric A. These switches are not configured as a stack but as two separate switches.

During testing if I shutdown the port the SAN is connected to on A1 it just becomes unreachable. It doesn't fail over to A2 at all.

If I fail over the SAN controller it still doesn't use A2.

The switch shows the port as up but it has no MAC addresses registered with it.

I have looked through lots of the product documentation but this information is not clearly explained in any of them.

Dell support were also unable to answer my question and said that as we didn't configure the switches in their recommended fashion (stacked) they couldn't help us.

dell

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The answer to this is Yes it will.

    The information I had that listed which ports the SAN would use on the switches wasn't entirely correct so basically I was using the wrong ports.

    For future reference the Equallogic uses the SAME ports on both Fabric A1 and A2. I was following the diagram below with my SAN in slots 7c, 7d, 8c and 8d.

    In this instance the Equallogic uses ports A1 P15, A1 P16 and then A2 P15 and A2 P16 (not A2 P31 and P32 as I had configured)

    enter image description here

    • 2

  2. Do you happen to know whether or not your M1000e has a v1.0 or v1.1 midplane?

    "The version of the midplane installed in the enclosure is displayed in the Midplane Revision field under the Summary tab of the CMC web-based interface"

    According to the M4110 Installation Guide, "the M1000e must have a Version 1.1 midplane for use with Fabric A"

    If you do have a v1.0 fabric, I would suggest testing on Fabric B if you have that option (if you have Ethernet on Fabric B), as that document only calls out Fabric A being reliant on the correct midplane version.

    Regarding support stating the configuration isn't as recommended, this white paper (EQL BP1049) only makes mention of a LAG-based configuration (no stack-based config is even presented as an option from what I'm seeing initially). I'm not certain which config is most "recommended" though.

    One last thought - you may just not be getting the results you expect because you're shutting ports down at a config level, and there's no true component failure that would signal a real need for failover. Perhaps try pulling A1 entirely and see whether the connection moves to A2?

    • 1