With 4 nodes, you should have 16 ports total? I started with just using 8 and ran into concerns, and ended up plugging in all 16. We share AIX, Windows, and ESX (also a large cluster) all on the same 16 ports. Each physical box has 2 HBA ports and is zoned to 2 different nodes, thus each physical host sees all 4 nodes. We intentionally spread our ESX hosts evenly across all 16 ports. I divided my 16 ports into 4 "sets". So a host will connect to "set 1" which means 2 ports on the A-side of the SAN and 2 ports on the B-Side. The aliases for the ports in the SAN show their set name so I can easily provision a host to a set.
The 3PAR Gui shows you your # hosts per port on the hosts section, by clicking on the T400... not drilling down under it. Thats how I tell which set to use next for the next provisioning.
It is best practice to isolate your Netapp V-series devices to their own ports, since they do not balance their traffic well and are very chatty.
Windows 2008 and ESX MPIO settings posed a challenge to us, meaning we couldn't ensure our windows/esx admins would reliably set the policy to round robin. We had 2 hosts having perfo issues (out of 100s) due to those 2 servers set to active/passive failover and both being active on the same port. We ended up deploying SAN Screen simply for its ability to alert/report on IO port balance per host based on metrics gathered from the switches.
I hope this helps.
_________________ Richard Siemers The views and opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.
|