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Tuesday, June 15, 2010

I love it when a plan comes together

Part of my plan for 2010 was to get more organized, both at work and in my personal life. We all have things we should be doing but have put aside for one reason or another. In my case, it's usually just laziness or a lack of motivation. Recently, I took the time to document the wiring of our server rack, something I had been meaning to do for a long time. As part of this, I was able to then go through the Netapp vSphere storage best practices and identify a few places where I hadn't implemented certain features, most notably, iSCSI multipathing. This came just after we had gone through Netapp upgrades to enable MPHA (multi-path high availability) on our FiberChannel connections.

Following this wonderful blog post on implementing iSCSI multipathing in vSphere and the best practices guide, I turned our single path failover NIC iSCSI connection into a multi-path round-robin load balanced one. You can see from the graph above when it was activated and the two NICs began to work in harmony. Since we currently only have one iSCSI LUN, the benefits are not great, but I will be adding a second one later today which should start to show the benefits of the configuration.

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