iSCSI Boot with EMC ALUA

[harris-sup]

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if you could help me out. Next week I'm planning to implement the following setup:

1) UCS B-Series with b200 m3 blades with 1280 VICs; UCSM 2.1

2) 2x Nexus 5Ks in vPC

3) 2x EMC vnx5300 in ALUA mode (active/active).

The plan is to install ESXi 4.1 on one blade and 5.1 on 5 other blades. Servers would boot from the iSCSI LUN.

The connection will be 10Gb ethernet only.

I have the following questions:

1) Have you experienced any issues with UCS servers booting from iSCSI in similar setup?

For example, emc going wild because running in active/active mode?

2) is it best practice to connect the storage using vPC? Are there any caveats?

Is my plan correct (see the attachment)?

Would appreciate any input. Thanks.

[gkumark]

Hi John,

To answer your questions..

1. UCS servers booting from iSCSI works perfect. We have many customers booting ESX from iSCSI on UCS. We have not seen any wild issues because of EMC storage running in ALUA mode.

2. vPC can be used as long as storage array supports vPC between N5K and storage array. I believe EMC VNX supports that. So it sounds to be a good design with storage being in active/active mode.

-Ganesh