UCS SAN boot order

[Hythim Ali El Hadad]

Hi,

Kindly when configuring SAN boot order, I have primary path for vHBA-0 and secondry for vHBA-1

Each can have 2 SAN Boot Target

So I can configure to max 4 Storage controller ports as targets

But we have DELL storage with 2-controllers. Each contain of 4 ports

So I have 8-ports on target

Is there any way to configure all the 8-ports in the boot order or it is limited to 4-only ?

Thanks

[Walter Dey]

Hi

I think its limited to 4 (2 per vhba).

Be aware that this only applies for the boot process, where 4 is perfectly ok for HA !

You can use all 8 for data traffic, and loadbalance the traffic.

You might need multiple hardware ports per controller, to serve multiple vsans. (controller ports most likely don't support vsan trunking !)

[Hythim Ali El Hadad]

So the 8-ports will be used for Data automatically without my intervention.

And it is sufficient to have 4-ports for booting hosts

I'm using one vsan per path. So I see it won't differ

[Walter Dey]

Don't know if your storage is directly connected to UCS FI or by means of a FC switch. 

Anyway, the situation regarding load balancing is identical; assuming one vsan per fabric and 8 uplinks: loadbalancing will be automatically round robin the outgoing connections (flog/plogi).

4 paths for booting is enough! it will start first interface with primary; if that fails, it will try secondary,......

8 paths for data ? I would check with your multipath software what the max. limit is;