HP ISCSI SAN question.

[C7J0yc3]

As you may know from a previous post I am working with a client to do a total server overhaul, so far everything is going smoothly, except I have some concerns with our SAN and as I have never set one up this way I'm not sure that we are doing it to best practices.

We have a HP Storagewokrs MSA2312 with 6 450GB SCSI drives in RAID 5 with a hot spare. We are connecting it to our two Prolient DL360s using 2 crossover cables to connect to 2 gigabit NICs. We have 2 LUNs, LUN1 is attached to server 1 LUN2 attached to server 2. Port A1 and B1 attach to server 1 and A2 and B2 attach to server 2. The setup is fine and we can read / write to the the SAN just fine, but the thing that worries me is that NIC 1 on both servers (labled ISCI1) is where all traffic to the SAN is going and there is no load balance to NIC2. I'm not sure if this is by design and NIC 2 is only there as a fallover should NIC1 fail, but if it is possible I would like to get them bridged or in a team so we could have 2GB/sec connections to our SAN.

Any suggestions, or sharing best practices would be much appreciated as HP is telling us everything is setup right for this configuration.

 

[mattjw916]

ProLiant servers should have a NIC teaming utility on them if you have the full ProLiant support pack installed. In the teaming utility (I forget what it's called since my current shop is IBM servers) there should be an option set them up for load-balancing (several different methods are available) in addition to acting as a fault-tolerant pair.

Even if you change this you aren't going to get double the speed though for a variety of reasons.

 

[C7J0yc3]

ProLiant servers should have a NIC teaming utility on them if you have the full ProLiant support pack installed. In the teaming utility (I forget what it's called since my current shop is IBM servers) there should be an option set them up for load-balancing (several different methods are available) in addition to acting as a fault-tolerant pair.

Even if you change this you aren't going to get double the speed though for a variety of reasons.

We do have the full support packs installed and I should look through them to see what we can do with them. Unfortunately I am about an hour away from the client site so I didn't want to touch anything until I am absolutely sure its going to fix the issue, however its definitely a good place to start looking.

I am also aware that I'm not going to get double the speed, but I will still have a better pipe then what I have now and that's the goal.