MPIO at Both Ends?

[bzabber]

I'm setting up MPIO and I want to know whether I have to setup MPIO on both the target and the initiator side or if I only have to setup MPIO on the initiator side?

The two technical papers on the webstie are not terribly clear and there seems to be quite a few errors in both documents which can be confusing. To me it seems all you have to do is enably MPIO on the initiator side and that's it.

Also I really don't see the purpose behind have how to create a target in each of the Multi pathing whitepapers, creating a target in StarWind should be in it's own white paper and MPIO and Multi pathing should only talk about MPIO and Multi pathing.

Thanks,
Bryan

[Aitor_Ibarra]

Hi Bryan,

MPIO is mostly on the initiator side. There's no special config on the Starwind side, but if you want MPIO to provide you with redundancy, you want at least 2 NICs on the Starwind server amd 2 NICs on the initiator, and two switches. By default, Starwind listens to every ip for iSCSI traffic, so if you've got the NICs installed and each set up with an IP, you don't need to do anything else. You don't have to install Microsoft MPIO on the Starwind server.

All the work is on the initiator side. For the basic set up described above (two of everything, so that you are covered for both NIC and switch failure), each target needs two MPIO paths defined, or four if you connect your switches together.

I find the terminology a bit odd too; for me a tech whitepaper is usually an explanation of how a technology works and why the world needs it; starwind white papers are more what I would call step-by-step guides.

cheers,

Aitor

[Robert (staff)]

Hi,

What Aitor has posted is totally correct.

Thanks

[bzabber]

The environment I'm building isn't built with too much redundancy so I only have one switch. I would've thought I would've had to have MPIO enabled on both the target and initiator ends but if you guys say so I'll uninstall MPIO from the Target server where StarWind is installed.

Thanks for the advice guys, it's truly appreciated.

Bryan

[bzabber]

My intent on using MPIO on the Target side was to aggregate both links using round-robin. Do I still need to not bother with MPIO on the StarWind server?

[Robert (staff)]

You don't need to bother at all with MPIO on the target side. Everything is done on the Initiator side.

Thanks