iSCSI initiator and Dell PowerVault MD3000i

Miroslav Lachman 000.fbsd at quip.cz
Thu Dec 17 15:46:49 UTC 2009


Sossi Andrej wrote:
> [...]
> I use MD300i with FreeBSD 7.0 and 7.1 with iscsi-2.2.2. It work fine.
> But be careful to configure MD3000i. MD3000i assign by default first
> disk to preferred controller 0, second disk to preferred controller 1,
> third disk to preferred controller 0, and so on. First, third, fifth...
> disks is usable from FreeBSD, but second, fourth,... disks result unusable.
> Work around: manually assign all disks to controller 0.
> I'm talking with Dell's technical support, but Dell not support FreeBSD!
> In any case, technical support tell me, the problem (maybe) is the
> multipath. FreeBSD use only one path (only one IP) to communicate to
> MD3000i. Second net interface in unused.
>
> I hope that I have been helpful.

It was helpful!
You are right, that MD Storage Manager set preferred controller path to 
0 for odd Virtual Disks and 1 to even Virtual Disks. (I don't know why)
And if I manually changed it to controller 0, I can access it by this 
preferred path, but can't access it by the other path.

Does it mean I can't use multipath feature? Or what is the right 
behavior of this "preferred path" settings?

Miroslav Lachman


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