To install the OS, we only presented one of the two paths. Once everything was up, we then loaded MPIO. Once the OS was up, we presented the second path.

Since both would try to “boot” without the MS MPIO drivers you would get contention and the boot process would go in the weeds. With MPIO it will figure it out and one will go active (it was always the first port for us).

On our testing we were able to pull a cable on the boot drive or the data drives and we would failover in about 5 seconds.

Let me know if you have any more questions!

Hey Scott - your site form doesn’t like my bladevault.info e-mail address

I also went under the targets tab and clicked “Log On”. I made sure to check the “Enable multi-path” and the automatic restore options. I then went to the “Advanced” button and changed the “Local Adapter” to the first Qlogic adapter. I left all other settings at their default. I repeated the process for my second HBA.

After that, clicking on the “Details” button, I see 4 sessions under the “Sessions” tab. Two for the HBA that appeared just because and two that I just added.

Under the “Devices” tab, I have 4 devices that are all multi-path. I’m using “Failover” for the “Load Balance Policy”.

I suspect I could just do all this for the second HBA since the first one is the one I booted from. More testing will tell. I know this works though. I can shutdown the active port on my Cisco switch and 15 seconds later, I can use the server again. I then reversed the process and shutdown the standby port to make sure there were no adverse affects from that scenario as well.

I may set the KeepAliveTO to a lower value, but I’m not sure how low I can go before causing instability.

Charlie

You didn’t mention if you were using blades, but my friend Aaron over at BladeVault.info posted this article a short while ago:

http://bladevault.info/?p=4

Perhaps this is affecting you as well?

I have two Qlogic 4050C cards in an HP server. I’ve installed Windows 2003 server (64-bit) and the MS iSCSI tools. I’ve tried about every combination I can think of but have yet to find one that works.

I’m booting from the SAN. I have one Qlogic card set to “manual” boot mode and specified all the right information. I can boot from the SAN just fine; just no failover.

To test failover, I’m disabling a port on my Cisco switch. I wait about 20 second and then turn it back on because the server becomes unresponsive.

My iSCSI SAN vendor is LeftHand.

Any suggestions on making it work would be great.

Thanks,
Charlie

The SAN-booted OS drive as well as any data drives. There’s no fault tolerance during the boot process, but once Windows has booted the OS drive fails over successfully, as do any data drives for that server.