Friday, March 19, 2010

Alua - Asymmetric Logical unit access

- industry standard protocol that enables the communication of storage paths and path characteristics between an initiator port and a target port.

If your storage array is ALUA compliant (as NetApp arrays are) then you’re in luck because the vSphere NMP is, by default, ALUA aware.

To enable Aula the igroups must be changed on each controller in the cluster

igroup set "igroupname" alua yes

Install ESX host utilities from netapp and run
config_mpath -s -m -a netappcontroller:root:password -a netappcontroller:root:password

This will enable round robin.

Round robin will allow for proper load balancing mult pathing

esxcli nmp device list on each ESX host to ensure RR and Aula are working
http://now.netapp.com/NOW/knowledge/docs/ontap/rel732_vs/html/ontap/bsag/GUID-EB9DBAE9-1E88-4421-9D02-FD820589515D.html